SR ^**.N*28S fX*9M& 



m- 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

--£.- — _ 

(Sfrap. ®mri$l ^a.._ 



Shell' M 



mMWM 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 






THE OUTERMOST RIM 



AND BEYOND. 



A CONTRIBUTION TOWARD PATIENCE, REVERENCE, SILENCE AND 
SPIRITUALITY, IN THE STUDY OF NATURE AND OF GOD. 



CHARLES VAN NORDEN. 



"Philosophy begins in wonder." — Plato. 



*«r^ 






.6 mi 



&r> 



NEW YORK: 

ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY, 

900 Broadway, cor. 20th Street. 






COPYRIGHT, 1882, BY 

ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY. 



Edward O. Jenkins, 

Printer and Stereotyper, 

20 North William Street, New York. 



PREFACE. 



The following treatise is only a contribution 
toward reverential thought upon divine things 
and not an effort to end controversy. What it 
omits of sacred truth is not, therefore, to be 
held as denied, doubted or even slighted ; and 
what it dwells upon is not purposely pushed 
forward into relatively undue prominence. 

This little work does not presume to rebuild 
the ruins of the observatories of this or that 
school, but rather to show that patience and 
reverence and spirituality can study the heavens 
anywhere in the open fields. It is written in 
hope that it may strengthen faith and courage 
in the hearts of some that falter, panic-stricken 
over the perils which in this age beset the cause 
of religion ; and it utters the firm and calm be- 
lief of the author, that, though stand-points 
may change and conceptions enlarge, the Truth 
will prevail. 

St. Albans, Vt. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PART FIRST. 

THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

Chap. I.— The Horizon, 7 

" II.— Widening Horizons, . . 18 

" III.— The Mystery of Nature, . . 29 

" IV.— The World's Shadow, ... 47 



PART SECOND. 

VOICES FROM BEYOND. 

Chap. V.— Hints of God in Physical Nat- 
ure, 55 

" VI.— Hints of God in the Moral 

Nature of Man, ... 68 

" VII.— The Teachings of the Religious 

Nature, 87 

" VIII.— God in History, . . . .102 

(5) 



6 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

PART THIRD. 

THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS. 

Chap. IX.— Inspired Genius, . . . .121 

X. — The Unexpected Christ, . . 134 

XL— Christ as an Epoch-Maker, . 151 

XII.— The Truth in Parable, . . 163 

XIIL— The Authority of Christ, . . 182 

XIV.— The Mysteries of Christ, . . 189 

CONCLUSION, 205 



THE OUTERMOST RIM. 
PART I. 



OHAPTEE I. 

THE HORIZON. 

** What an enigma then is man ! What a strange chaotic, 
and contradictory being ! fudge of all things, feeble earth- 
worm ! depository of truth, mass of uncertainty! glory and 
butt of the Universe ! If he boast himself, I abase him ; if 
he humble himself, I glory in him ; and I always contradict 
him till he comprehends that he is an incomprehensible mon- 
ster." — Pascal. 

On the eastern shore of the Lake of Geneva 
there stands well-preserved an ancient castle, 
with draw bridge and moat, with turrets and 
donjon-keep. Time has dealt gently with 
Chillon, and the storms of ages have but 
roughened its walls for creepers and lichens. 
It rises from the blue waters of Leman in the 
foreground and contrasts with the green slopes 
of Villeneuve in the background — colossal, for- 
midable and picturesque as of old. 

On one summer's day, three men of different 

(7) 



8 



THE OUTERMOST RIM. 



moods strolled through its precincts and pon- 
dered its memories. The first was a disciple of 
utility — a statistician, who had won for himself 
a name for unusual common sense. He en- 
tered the ancient archway with critical eye,* 
measuring-tape in hand ; and, as he paced the 
courts and climbed the rude stairways and 
looked down from the battlements, he solilo- 
quized thus : 

" These massive walls— how they tell of an 
age of despotic sway over brute strength! 
This desolate banquet-hall — what an unkempt 
herd of ruffians was wont to gather around the 
oaken board ! And this ladies' boudoir, with- 
out carpet and without pictures — how comfort- 
less and dreary ! Poor little women ! how 
they must have twirled and tugged at these 
old spinning-wheels to keep their untidy men- 
at-arms in clean homespun ! How long could 
such a fortification as this have held out against 
a well-equipped force of French or Italian chiv- 
alry ? So much beef and so much pork and so 
much grain would have been needed month by 
month. Water at least must have been plenty, 
drawn up from the profound depths under the 
western wall. Ah, here is the armory ! These 
are the breast-plates, helmets, and greaves of 
mediaeval war. Very small, all of them ! 
They could not be worn by an average soldier 



THE HORIZON. 9 

in any American regiment of today. The 
famous knights of old were short and slight. 
The times have manifestly bettered. Doubt- 
less this is owing to cleaner and warmer homes, 
wholesomer food, purer habits, improved pa- 
thology, and especially to the less frequent 
slaughter of the vigorous men. What a rude 
age it was — poor in resources, feeble in brain- 
power, and barbarous in spirit ! " 

And the man of common sense went forth 
content with the present, and with no shadow of 
regret over the past or any of its belongings. 

The second traveller was a poet. He saw 
with his imagination and measured with his 
fancy. The ivy on the walls, the lichens and 
mosses that had overgrown clammy nooks and 
the crumbling battlements, all served to dismiss 
the present ; and the past was come again. He 
bowed over the parapet and gazed down into 
the blue depths of the water beneath ; he scan- 
ned pensively the chaplet of mountain peaks 
that crowned the glorious landscape ; and lo, the 
little steamer down on the lake, that panted in- 
ward toward the landing-place laden with tour- 
ists, was become a barge, rowed by men in 
white, and bearing the lord of the land and his 
beautiful lady to the baronial hall. Overhead 
streamed again in the sunshine the ancient ban- 
ner, embroidered with the ancestral coat-of- 



10 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

arms; and from the silent court below came 
up the old hum of many voices. Ere long, in- 
stead of a host of tourists, all agape with 
curiosity, and red guide-book in hand, the lord 
and his lady and many a goodly knight and 
dame and man-at-arms, seemed to march in gay 
procession over the drawbridge and through the 
archway into the castle court. And now the 
men were in the hall, whole sides of beef 
steaming on the oaken tables, and wine poured 
forth like water; with boisterous merriment 
and rude uncanny wit, they crammed their 
bodies with coarse food. And here above, in 
the quiet of the boudoir, the ladies assembled. 
Yonder against the wall was a little shrine in 
ivory, and Jesus crucified, and here a shrine in 
ebony of a saint. On this side and on that hung 
long, heavy arras — and yonder stood a Venetian 
mirror. A carved cabinet of exquisite work- 
manship, the product of endless labor, contain- 
ed my lady's finery. Here they were sitting, 
by this ample window, to look out upon as 
lovely a view as ever greeted mortal eye, the 
lady and her maids, delicate tissues adorning 
her graceful person, a coronet of gold besttid 
with gems gracing her fair brow, and embroi- 
dery of exquisite pattern employing her white 
fingers. And now the lay of the minstrel was 
heard, and now the clash of the tournament, 



THE HORIZON. \\ 

and again in the silent night the serenade. And 
the poet went forth, dreams of woman's beauty 
and of man's prowess, and of all the glitter 
and gayety of the ancient chivalry, rendering 
tame the present and glorifying the past ; and 
he murmured : 

u Thrilling days, those days of old, 
For ladies fair and warriors bold." 

The third traveller was a sad man, a person 
of active sympathies, a philanthropist. He 
neither measured nor idealized the old fortress : 
he thought mostly of the poor serfs out beyond, 
in the wretched huts, that time had mercifully 
swept away. He reflected, that the few revel- 
led and the many toiled. 

My lord and my lady pursued a careless life 
amid plenty and in idleness ; but their pros- 
perity was wrung with mailed hand and iron 
heel out of their despised vassals and their 
weaker neighbors. Every stone in the massive 
walls seemed to echo back the blow of a lash 
and a groan ; every old piece of armor seemed 
covered with the blood-stains of murder and 
robbery. He went down into the accursed 
dungeon, and gazed with horror upon the pil- 
lars to which wretches had been chained in a 
living death, for no other cause than to gratify 
the vengeance or to serve the interests of my 
lord. He peered with blanched face into the 



1 2 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

noisome hole where the executioner did his 
horrid work, and looked out upon the calm 
lake through the opening in the cellar wall, 
whence the headless body was thrust forth. 
Here they died, condemned by their enemy, 
without judge or jury. " Let the stones crum- 
ble," he cried ; " let the archways fall ; let the 
walls be shaken of an earthquake and come 
down ; let the keep be riven of lightnings, and 
let lichens and mosses and ivies hide out of 
sight this monument of ancient injustice ! On 
the ruins of this colossal tyranny let there 
spring up a modern city, granting equal rights 
to all, in its civil liberties, its freedom of wor- 
ship, and its general good-will and prosperity, 
affording a glorious contrast to the old-time 
barbarity that has been, and, thanks to God, is 



gone ! " 



And the philanthropist shook off the dust of 
his feet against the castle, and hurried out into 
the free sunshine. 

And all three travellers judged wisely, each 
from his own stand-point. 

Indeed, this is only a parable. All human 
knowledge is from some particular stand-point, 
and its view is limited by some particular 
horizon. The most ample descriptions do not 
convey all that may be seen ; and the most pro- 
found and varied reflections never exhaust any 



THE HORIZON. 13 

great subject of thought. Personality is a 
marked factor of knowledge; personal pecu- 
liarities color it, and personal imperfections 
condition it. Our powers are few in number, 
limited in range, feeble in action, and fettered 
by habits. 

Witnesses before juries often testify, with 
utmost sincerity, in a contradictory way, to facts 
of which they have all been equally cognizant. 
And even among practiced observers, like varia- 
tions in accounts of natural phenomena occur. 
It is common for astronomers and microscopists 
to delineate precisely the same object, with such 
difference in description as to produce in the 
helpless listener's mind utter confusion. There 
are not two artists in the world that can paint 
the same landscape, so as to produce like 
pictures. 

Literature has given us few dramatists and 
historians, because men can not readily free 
themselves from personal prepossessions, and 
take a foreign stand-point. To be able to see 
with other eyes, and to feel in emotions prompt- 
ed by other than our own surroundings, is 
genius of a high sort. 

And not only individuals are thus limited. 
Communities, races and ages have their com- 
mon point of view and common horizon. The 
Greeks, incapable of appreciating merit other 



14 



THE OUTERMOST RIM. 



than their own, called alien races barbarians. 
The Chinese have done the same. Even to-day 
the Italians speak of foreigners as "forestieri," 
or savages. The Eskimo call themselves " the 
people," as do other isolated races. And, speak- 
ing of the Eskimo, one is reminded that, to 
them, Heaven is below in the warm regions of 
the under-earth, and the saints go down; while 
Hell is above in the icy chill of the upper air, 
and the wicked go up. In general, Hell is fiery 
to peoples living amid fierce heats, and icy to 
peoples suffering from endless winter. Just so, 
Satan is pictured by white races as black, and 
by black races as white. 

Stand-point involves horizon ; and it is curious 
to note how, as the eye of any individual or 
race or age looks out from things near and dis- 
tinct to the Outermost Rim of the visible, it is 
found that thought becomes ever more and 
more feeble. 

As we approach the limits of our intelligence 
on any side, thinking becomes difficult, and 
hence, often flaccid and indifferent, — the eye 
directing itself toward the horizon, sees blended 
together, indistinguishably, things small and 
great — a mountain, a lake, a cloud, and the 
wing of a bird. 

A good illustration of this difficulty attending 
knowledge on the outermost limits is had in the 



THE HORIZON. 15 

indifference with which even thinking men re- 
ceive the great recent discovery, by the spectro- 
scope, of our chemical elements in the sun and 
stars. Consider what this involves and sug- 
gests. 

The gases and solids of the earth are to be 
found in the sun and stars. The elements of 
which our atmosphere, our oceans, and our con- 
tinents are composed, form the substance of 
the whole material creation. Notwithstanding 
the inconceivable distances and undoubted diver- 
sities of infinite space, there is oneness in sub- 
stance as well as unity in law. 

This discovery revives the old speculation 
about other worlds. We now recognize the 
possibility of other globes, containing forms of 
life similar, or at least allied to, those of earth. 
Doubtless they are remote. It may be that 
there is not another inhabitable globe within 
our solar system. Our planets are in general 
too old or too young for organic existence. Our 
own moon is without an atmosphere, burnt out 
— a cinder, as it has been termed — cold and 
dead. Jupiter, on the other hand, is yet in its 
early youth, still a molten ball, and not suffi- 
ciently cooled at the surface to offer a solid 
crust for life. Mars may perhaps provide the 
necessary conditions, and also, possibly, the 
moons of Jupiter and Saturn. 



} Q THE OUTERMOST RIM, 

But the condition of our solar system does 
not at all affect the problem of a multiplicity 
of worlds. It is enough that there is one in- 
habitable globe. For there is an infinity of 
systems, and if these average even less than 
one such orb, it follows that there are an infinity 
of worlds. If there be but one inhabited globe 
in each solar system, or but one in ten systems, 
then are there, by virtue of a stupendous but 
inevitable sequence, earths teeming with life, 
infinite in number. As we look out upon the 
starry heavens, though there may, in the silence 
of the night, seem loneliness, the imagination 
is fairly entitled to picture universal existence 
— life infinitely distributed and infinitely diver- 
sified. 

Yet how little does this tremendous possi- 
bility affect our imaginations, enter into our 
conversation, or even at all occupy our thoughts ! 
How many even of very intelligent men, as 
they walk under the shining canopy of a star- 
lit night, find their thoughts going out into the 
measureless to picture other worlds and races ; 
how many find any chord of sympathy touched 
by possibilities of non-human intelligences, 
achievements and virtues? Not one in a thou- 
sand, and with these not on one of a hundred 
nights. 

We naturally think most often and most 



THE HORIZON, y\ 

clearly about matters that intimately concern us. 
Food, dress, friendship, the family, politics and 
similar affairs occupy our time and strength. 

We are quite content to leave the heavens to 
astronomers ; and the majesty of the universe, 
if we confess it, is rather painful, for the very 
strain it puts upon our faculties ; and, if there 
be other inhabited worlds, their condition is too 
hopelessly unknown and unknowable to stimu- 
late more than a passing curiosity. 

It never is difficult to reach the limit of hu- 
man thought in any given direction, and to 
draw visibly against the skies the Outermost Rim 
of vision — the horizon of knowledge. And, 
then, one is seen standing like Columbus on the 
shore of an unexplored ocean, wondering what 
beauty and life may be beyond. 

For outside of the Outermost Rim of human 
thought, there is yet an infinity of truth — of 
things that are knowable, when the adequate 
powers of discovery and comprehension come 
to us. The mind's knowledge is like the eye's 
landscape : the eye sees what of the landscape 
comes within the power and sweep of vision, 
but beyond, unseen, roll away the mountains 
and the valleys, the rivers and the plains. So 
mental vision has its scope. Beyond the range 
of even poet's and prophet's insight, the end- 
less world of knowledge rolls on and on. 



CHAPTER II. 

WIDENING HORIZONS. 

11 The thoughts of men are widened, with the process of the 
runs" — Tennyson. 

There is an old Greek proverb, which de- 
clares that " man is the measure of the uni- 
verse." It were better to compare him to one 
that wearily ascends the mountains with ever- 
widening horizons. He measures the universe 
only as the eye measures distance. The keener 
the eye and the higher the altitude, the more is 
there to measure. 

The Outermost Rim of human thought is 
not fixed, neither for the race as a whole, nor 
for any individual. One man's horizon is an- 
other's foreground. Some are keener in sight 
than others, and some higher up. There is a 
wide band of knowledge between the Outer- 
most Rim — of the savage, for instance, and the 
mental scope of the philosopher; between the 
thoughts of the dullard and of the genius. At 
any one time, in any great city, may be seen, 
as the eye scans the face of human society, the 
widening scope of vision, from the ignorant 
(18) 



WIDENING HORIZONS. \§ 

puzzle-headed churl of the slums to the white- 
haired gold-spectacled sage of the study, the 
laboratory and the rostrum. 

Here is a savage — a South Sea Islander, let 
us suppose — whose world is a forest, whose sky 
is a brazen dome, his stars fire-flies hung against 
a canopy, his God a hulking spirit of childish 
malignity. This wretch has buried alive his 
aged mother, because her teeth were gone and 
she was become useless to herself and her tribe; 
he has slain his girl-babies, because unable to 
hunt, fish, and fight. He can not count ten : he 
can not form abstract conceptions : he can not 
reason consecutively on any given topic. He 
is a feebly-thinking animal. 

Much higher stands the barbarian, with his 
house and his horse, his flexible language, his 
laws, his government, and his crude but unfold- 
ing intelligence. His world is a continent, his 
heaven at least a mystery, his Gods the forces 
of nature. 

Higher still, we find the semi-civilized and 
the civilized spreading over a hemisphere, cov- 
ering the seas with the white wings of com- 
merce, adorning the land with cities, palaces, 
temples — the heavens a profound study for 
philosophers, religion a grand ceremonial, and 
deity becoming dim 3 vast and majestic. 

At last our eye rests on the poet, the prophet, 



20 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

the scientist of enlightenment ; and lo ! the 
skies are now the infinite expanse of flaming 
suns and of numberless planets, teeming with 
wondrous forms of life. The world is but a 
tiny globe, and God is the Creator, the De- 
signer, and the Aim of All, through all and in 
all. From the notion of Deity has been elimi- 
nated all that can belittle Absolute Power and 
Infinite "Wisdom and Goodness. 

And this difference in horizons, to-day, is but 
the result of different rates of enlargement in 
days gone by. From the savage to the sage is 
not only a present contrast, but a movement of 
history. The savage of the 19th century is 
but an instance of arrested development. 

No intelligent man, in these times, ought to 
deny a general onward and upward movement 
in human affairs. The river of progress is, in- 
deed, unequal in its flow : here it frets its banks 
and there it dashes against rocks, while yonder 
it glides along, placid and deep ; now it widens 
into a broad and shallow lake, and loiters over 
its rolling sands, and scarce can push through 
its rushes and lilies ; now it hides behind bluffs 
and pauses in quiet coves, ere long, in narrow 
defiles, to dash forward impetuous and resist- 
less ; it has its surface ripples which run with 
the wind, it has its surface eddies which return 
on themselves, it has its under-currents, that the 



WIDENING HORIZONS. 21 

eye perceives not at all ; but, slow or fast, noisy 
or still, it flows on and on, from its fountain in 
the primeval fire-mist to its Ocean of Eternity. 
The crudest notions of early ages and of unripe 
civilizations were pebble shocks on the surface 
of this river ; that, as they became by ever-en- 
larging ripples a mighty circumference of de- 
duction and inference, were themselves swept 
onward to mingle with the other forces of 
movement. The late Dr. James Martineau de- 
clared in one of his profound discourses: 
"Every fiction that has ever laid strong hold 
on human belief is the mistaken image of some 
great truth, to which reason will direct its 
search, while half -reason is content with laugh- 
ing at the superstition, and unreason with be- 
lieving it." The great thought of each after 
age was once a mere childish puzzling. As 
civilization progresses conceptions ripple out. 
One man sees, and he shows many men. 

All great discoveries of underlying laws have 
come as a rise in altitude and a widening of 
horizon. The wise, by some new brilliancy of 
imagination, by some unwonted grasp of reason, 
discern and declare. The history of mathe- 
matics is of intense interest to us here. All its 
intricate methods and wonderful combinations 
have come by fresh unf oldings of intuition in cer- 
tain select minds, which they themselves have 



22 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

been unable to explain. Simply they have 
risen higher, and see what others can not. 
They show other select minds — as it were, take 
them up the Mount of Vision, and these see ; 
but generations pass ere such abstruse discov- 
eries can be taught in the schools. The laws 
detected by a few, by and by form part of the 
education of all. The rare exotic becomes a 
garden vegetable — at first furnishing delight 
for the few, at last supplying food for all. 

Thus, the discovery of fluxions by Newton, 
and of calculus by Leibnitz, has opened endless 
vistas of mathematical accomplishment. The 
establishment of the Copemican System lifted 
astronomy out of the region of ever-failing 
hypothesis into the position of an exact science, 
and guaranteed swift discovery. The demon- 
stration of the laws of gravity by Newton did 
the same for mechanics, and prepared the way 
for all the recent discoveries in light, heat, 
electricity, and motion, viewed as expressions 
of force. 

Music has advanced by leaps. At first, when 
Miriam fingered her lyre by the Red Sea, and 
David sang sweet psalms to the harp, music, 
whether instrumental or vocal, was but a mel- 
ody — a simple succession of notes, with little 
that would be pleasing to the modern taste in 
the air ; while instruments were of rudest con- 



WIDENING HORIZONS. 23 

strnction. When Moses came down from the 
Mount, it was not strange that Joshua, hearing 
a hideous outcry among the tents, should have 
said, " There is a noise of war in the camp ! " 
The people were singing ; and even to Joshua, 
the man of battles, it seemed like the hoarse 
roar of infuriated combatants. 

Harmony, or the combination of simulta- 
neous tones, appeared not earlier than the Mid- 
dle Ages, and at once attained a high degree of 
perfection ; while orchestration, or the use in 
combination or in contrast, of instruments of 
different capacities and qualities of tone, was 
the product of the last century. About the 
middle of the last century, music underwent a 
wonderful illumination. A musician of rarest 
genius appeared, and in a succession of the 
most wonderful compositions the world had yet 
listened to, revolutionized the art, and ushered in 
an entirely new era. Mozart was a man of 
weak will, and the almost passive channel of 
ideas that came to him without effort, and of 
heavenly strains that wafted through his soul 
by day and by night. Nor was he alone. An 
angel chorus was come again to earth to make 
the Old World young. And with Mozart, and 
Haydn, and Handel, and Mendelssohn, and 
Beethoven, came oratorios and symphonies, so 
seraphic, so exalting, so beyond all former con- 



24- THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

ception, that it has taken the gross world a 
century to recognize the sublimity of this out- 
burst of art, of this enlarging of the range of 
the human mind and of the sphere of human 
happiness. 

Such an outburst of genius gave us the Gothic 
cathedrals ; and earlier a similar advance upon 
former art produced Italian painting, or still 
earlier, Grecian sculpture. 

The beauties of nature are of recent discern- 
ment. The ancients did not keenly perceive 
the picturesque in landscape. The picturesque 
in action is delineated on their vases, walls, 
temples and tombs. Homer dwells fondly 
upon scenes of life action and passion ; a lion 
aroused from his lair and tossing the dogs aside 
to dash at the hunter, a warrior going forth to 
battle in brazen armor, the sun glittering on his 
shield, a personal combat, a hive of bees, a 
council of war, a home circle, a storm at sea — 
such pictures are drawn with matchless art; 
but the beauty of mist and shadow and vary- 
ing tints — what may be called the atmospheric 
charm of nature — wholly escaped him. As late 
as the last century, Oliver Goldsmith, who 
wrote the sweetest, purest English of his time, 
the versatile genius who at once composed an 
immortal novel, an immortal poem, and an im- 
mortal play, declared of the Scottish Highlands 



WIDENING HORIZONS. 25 

— then given over to wild clans, but now 
thronged with tens of thousands of tourists, 
entranced with beauty of mountain and of lake 

— that they were "a hideous wilderness." 
"Everywhere the country presents the same 
dismal aspect ! " And Samuel Johnson asserted 
that u country gentlemen could not be happy : 
there was not enough to keep their lives in mo- 
tion." 

At present the picturesque in Nature is dwelt 
upon with ardor, and its delineation has become 
an eminent part of successful art, whether for 
the painter, the poet, or the novelist. 

Indeed, there seems not only a progress of 
thought in human history, but also a progress 
of thinking. There is reason to believe that 
the human mind is not only constantly develop- 
ing its possibilities in various lines of advance- 
ment, but that also the brain, the organ of 
mind, is itself undergoing a change that multi- 
plies its possibilities. 

Does this seem improbable ? But why should 
the Outermost Kim of even mental capacity be 
fixed? 

Study for a moment the comparative anat- 
omy of the nerve-centers of animals, and see 
what we shall learn, at least of the possibilities 
of improvement in the mental mechanism. 

The lowest of creatures have no nervous 



26 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

system ; hence in them we discover no signs of 
any self-conscious intelligence. But early in 
the series nerve-cells appear, as in the lower of 
the mollusks. Here we find a mere beginning, 
with a simple arrangement of excitor and 
motor nerves. Rising higher, we find com- 
posite animals, each segment supplied with 
such an apparatus. Then we come to animals 
having heads and two or more ganglia furnish- 
ing a feeble brain for the exercise of vision and 
hearing, and perhaps of taste and smell. Still 
farther up the scale, there is discovered a spinal 
cord, or continuous aggregate of nerve-centers. 
Then, the spinal cord enlarges in the head of 
still higher creatures into ganglionic masses. 
We are now on the high-road of intelligence, 
and each rise in order brings us to a larger and 
finer brain, new masses of ganglia overlapping 
the old — to the spinal cord there is added a 
sensorium, to the sensorium a cerebellum, and 
to the cerebellum at last that final triumph of 
nature, the cerebrum — the organ of reason, of 
science, and of civilization. 

Did I say final ? 

Who knows if the present man be the final 
product of Nature's marvellous fertility ? Who 
knows what higher orders are possible, and per- 
haps somewhere existent? Who knows what 
may come to man as he is of new develop- 



WIDENING HORIZONS. 27 

ment ? The future may not bring to the hu- 
man head nerve masses to overlap the cere- 
brum ; but it is very certain that the human 
brain, in the progress of civilization, has en- 
larged in average weight and size, and become 
more and more complex in convolution and 
nerve-branchings. No one can deny that the 
demands of enlightenment are answered by the 
development of new capabilities at the plastic 
nerve-centers. The study of nerve develop- 
ment furnishes prophecy of what shall be, of 
what even now may be in other worlds — ex- 
planation, encouragement, incitement. 

Or leaving physiology, approach from the 
psychological stand-point. Watch the mental 
growth of a child. Every day you see the circle 
of thought widened, the altitude higher, the 
horizons broadening. You see, little by little, 
the clouds break, the mists dissolve, the heavens 
open, the stars shine, the universe revealed. 
Gaze into the bright, puzzled little eyes, as 
great thoughts appear on the Outermost Bim, 
like ships at sea out of the far-away horizon. 
The feeble reasonings would discern and under- 
stand, but can not. Do you not know that the 
man shall master what balks the child ? And 
the greatest problems that defy the powers of 
the wisest men are but child's play ; and these 
men are but babes to the sages that shall come. 



28 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

And so we are brought to a position of su- 
preme importance. If all human knowing has 
its limit, if the Outermost Rim is not fixed, if 
horizons forever expand, then knowledge is not 
final — it is relative, tentative, partial. "Now 
we know in part," quoth Paul. 

Nay, it is no sacrilege to ascribe limits to 
even the highest conceivable modes of existence 
and to the loftiest beings, that may somewhere 
dwell. If there be angels and archangels, they 
penetrate not into all knowledge. Surely, for 
highest Principality and Heavenly Power there 
is an horizon — and Infinity Beyond ! 

Only an Absolute Intelligence has no Outer- 
most Eim and no Beyond. 



OHAPTEE III. 

THE MYSTERY OF NATURE. 

1 ' Race after race, man after man, 
Have thought that my secret was theirs, 
Have dreained that I lived but for them, 
That they were my glory and joy; 
They are dust, they are changed, they are gone, 
I re?nain ! " — Matthew Arnold. 

Search Nature in what direction we may, 
we soon find our thought on the Outermost 
Bim. She shows us her waves, and their glanc- 
ing lights and endless changes of form, but they 
only conceal her profound ocean . 

The Cause, the Method, and the Purpose of 
Nature are each profoundly mysterious. Why ? 
How ? and by Whom ? We may penetrate a 
little way into the fog, but soon are lost. We 
may say of rain that it is caused by certain 
electric and atmospheric conditions precipi- 
tating the moisture of the air ; but immediately 
we ask, What made the moisture, and what 
guarantees the working of the conditions ? We 
may assert evolution of Nature's progress, and 
think to have proven many interesting facts of 
method ; but the moving force, the real evolver, 

(29) 



30 THE O UTERMOST RIM. 

is still hidden in Nature's background. And 
when we ask why this or that adaptation should 
occur, while we perceive Reason in it, we may 
utterly fail to find reasons/br it. And Nature, 
as a whole, is a yet greater mystery even than 
any of its items. 

Its mystery enlarges into the Infinite, and 
diminishes into the Infinitesimal. 

Let us proceed to some details. 

It would be easy here to weary the reader 
with the oft-stated astronomical magnitudes of 
the universe, and the infinities and infinitesimals 
of physics and mechanics. 

One instance will suffice. A ray of light 
travels from the sun — upwards of ninety mil- 
lions of miles — in less than ten minutes. Yet 
a ray from the polar star, moving with equal 
speed, requires forty-six years for its journey. 
And the polar star is a next-door neighbor. 

We may find more novel and quite as profit- 
able illustrations of Nature's mystery on every 
side. 

Indeed, more wonderful far than even the 
celestial physics and mechanics are the facts of 
life. To these, for the moment, let us turn our 
attention. 

Ultimately, life is the property of a vital jelly 
called protoplasm. For plant and for animal, 



THE MYSTERY OF NATURE. 3 \ 

existence at first is just one infinitesimal droplet 
of living slime ; and if modern scientists are to 
be believed, existence at its genealogical begin- 
ning was just this, — only this, and nothing 
more. 

Only this % Nay, now we use the language 
of ignorance. A drop of protoplasm is infi- 
nitely more marvellous than any or all of man's 
erections and contrivances, more marvellous 
than glaciers, than mountains, than bowling 
planets and flaming suns ! And, being the 
starting-point of higher forms of life, the proto- 
plasmic droplet is very naturally itself the lowest 
form of life. 

In any stagnant water you may find Amoeba 
— a sluggish mass of moving jelly, invisible to 
the naked eye, and, under the microscope, with- 
out form, without organs, without members. 
An unsightly mass, it pushes forward its sub- 
stance in a blunt finger, and then — canker- 
worm-like — draws itself onward, though with- 
out eyes, feet, or muscles, rolling across the 
field, a vital motion of colorless slime. Some- 
times the effort is too great for its cohesiveness ; 
and then the two parts, the finger forward and the 
mass behind, separate. And then there are two 
creatures instead of one. It approaches a 
savory diatom. Behold the wise jelly flow up 
.against its prey, ooze about the diatom, sur- 



32 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

round it, embrace it, and, by some mysterious 
chemistry, solve out the edible portion within, 
soon to flow away onward anywhither, leaving 
the crystal shell behind. 

Growth is but a multiplication, by division 
and absorption, of an original protoplasmic 
droplet. The lichen that colors the rock, the 
alga thrown out upon the sea-beach of the 
storm-tide, the annual that blossoms in our 
gardens, the shrubs and fruit-trees that crowd 
our gardens and orchards, and the leafy giants 
that lift proud heads toward the skies in our 
forests, all are but multiplications of an original 
cell. 

Animal growth is similar. Even our human 
bodies are, in all their parts, the result of cell 
division and cell manufacture, and, indeed, may 
be looked upon as an assemblage — infinite in 
number and greatly diversified in appearance 
and function — of cells and their products. Man, 
as a living thing, is a polypidom. Many of his 
composite cells have a comparatively indepen- 
dent existence. During a violent cold, living 
cells, abundantly provided with cilia, very active 
and capable of lively motion, are dislodged 
from the mucous coating of the nasal passages, 
and discharged in the catarrhal flow ; and the 
microscopist may behold part of himself, as in- 
dependently existent, for the moment, as any 



THE MYSTERY OF NATURE. 33 

animalcule. Living cells often survive the 
death of the body as a whole ; and the reason 
that death reduces all to corruption in a short 
time is probably, that the individual cells perish 
for lack of nourishment. 

Over the porch of the author's parsonage 
there droops a Virginia creeper, on the leaves 
of which, any day in summer, may be found 
tiny yellowish pellets, resembling drops of 
amber. Gather some of these. Now go down 
to yonder lake, and from the under-side of over- 
turned stones in the shallow water of the shore, 
you shall find little masses of dotted slime as 
large as a pea. Secure two such masses, and 
observe that the dots are white pellets. Exam- 
ine the white and the yellow pellets day by day 
with a microscope. The pellets are simple 
cells, and no great difference is apparent be- 
tween the three kinds. To-day each is only a 
little protoplasm, confined by a thin membrane. 
To-morrow we shall find a division of contents, 
and two cells in each pellet ; and day after to- 
morrow four, and the next day eight. Com- 
plexity will increase, until we become quite 
confused by indefinite lines and curves. But, 
in the end, there shall be a recognizable form, 
a movement, and at last rupture of the cover- 
ing membrane. We shall then perceive that 
our amber pellets are become each a beautiful 
3 



34 THE OUTERMOST RIM, 

insect, that the droplets of the first mass of 
slime are changed into snails, and the droplets 
of the second mass into fresh-water lobsters. 
From three simple and similar specks of living 
jelly will have come insects, mollusks, and crus- 
taceans. This same study of embryology we 
might carry through the whole animal kingdom, 
always beginning with a cell and always end- 
ing with some one of Nature's animated creat- 
ures. Protoplasm never makes any mistakes : 
it ever works true to its idea. It commences 
in seeming identity : it ends in all the diversity 
of the sea-bottoms and the forests. 

The cell is Nature's laboratory: here she 
generates organic substances — starch, sugar, 
gluten, oil, and, no doubt, in animals, vital 
forces. The worker is protoplasm. 

If one will cut a section of any living vegeta- 
ble tissue, and examine it with the microscope, 
the cells are seen crowding one another, and, 
through their transparent walls, the operations 
of vitality in full effort. So small are these 
tiny chambers that a hundred millions of them 
would not fill a cubic inch measure. They ap- 
pear as compartments, closed in on every side, 
yet not hermetically sealed. The walls are 
porous, and juices freely may flow through the 
entire tissue. The protoplasm — chemist, manu- 
facturer, life-giver — lies just inside this bibulous 



THE MYSTERY OF NATURE. 35 

membrane, in a thin lining; it is also distrib- 
uted through the chamber in threads and small 
masses. Between these threads and masses, in 
the spaces remaining, may be seen the products 
of activity, — the cell-sap, and floating in this, 
starch grains, oil globules, crystals, crystalloids, 
and living cell-germs which frisk about in all 
the sportiveness of youth. Most important is a 
denser portion of the protoplasm, called the 
nucleus, in which the power of self-division and 
multiplication lies. 

The protoplasm itself, is a soft, tough, ine- 
lastic, extensible body; which, to the chemist, 
displays only simple elements, combined to- 
gether apparently in a commonplace albumin- 
ous substance ; yet, as we have seen, it turns out, 
with ease and the most perfect precision, com- 
pounds that baffle the skill of the greatest 
chemists, and, unseen and noiseless, weaves all 
the wondrous fabric of life. 

But enough upon the mere phenomena of 
life and growth. Proceeding to the study of 
the higher and more complicated forms of vi- 
tality, our attention at every step is directed to 
marvels most astonishing. 

On the shores of many ponds and swamps is 
found the pitcher-plant. It has neither brains 
nor nerves, and yet embodies a device which 



36 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

can furnish us abundant substance for reflec- 
tion. 

It is remarkable for its leaf, which is a hol- 
low, trumpet-shaped tube, with an over-arching 
hood. The tube is half-filled with water, which 
the leaf itself has secreted and which is be- 
fouled with the hard parts of flies- and insects. 
In short, the leaf is a trap : in its water, insects 
are drowned and their softer parts dissolved, 
to be absorbed into the tissues as nutriment. 
The pitcher-plant is carnivorous, and thrives on 
animal diet. 

.But how does a vegetable growth entice its 
animal prey into a watery grave ? It can not, 
like the swallow, catch them on the wing. It 
can not, like a spider, bind them with silken 
cords in the meshes of a web. None of the 
devices of conscious ingenuity would seem open 
to its choice. Yet, unconscious and unthinking, 
without action and without feeling, it selects 
the very wisest of means to attain its end. Sar- 
racenia fills her larder by the agency of a large 
number of tiny glands at the throat of her 
tube, which secrete a sweet fluid, enticing to 
ants and flies. This lures the victim downward. 
Pursuing his honeyed way, the intruder passes 
over a multitude of long, sharp spines, which, 
pointing downward, offer no obstacle to descent. 
And now he stands on the brink of the deadly 



THE MYSTERY OF NATURE. 37 

well, full of the remains of former victims. 
Would he retreat : above him hang down the 
spines (possibly poisoned) pointing full at him — 
a formidable abattis, which he can neither force 
nor surmount. It results that he dies in the 
plant and furnishes a rich feast. 

Now, who .or what has thought out all this 
subtle contrivance, and why ? Surely not the 
pitcher-plant itself. Was it created with a 
taste for animal food, with its glands and its 
bristles, and its pool of death ? or did it, in the 
struggle for existence, through favorable varia- 
tions and survival of the fittest, come to be thus 
thrifty ? In either case the mystery is profound. 
If specific creation wrought the wonder, the 
mystery is truly colossal ; if natural selection is 
to be credited, no less are we astonished, and 
we must continue to ask, whose wit proposed 
the condition of a law resulting thus shrewdly ? 
What or who was interested ; that Sarracenia 
should vary her diet of minerals and gases with 
animal food. Ah ! we are on the Outermost 
Rim and looking far over Beyond — and beyond 
is Mystery ! 

And only seemingly less wonderful than the 
craft of Sarracenia, is the wit of a spider 
which infests a pitcher-plant of Florida, who 
hides himself under the hood, and there exacts 
from the incoming procession of flies and ants, 



38 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

tribute of such juicier ones as please his fancy ; 
or the cunning of an ant in Borneo, which, hav- 
ing discovered the danger of entering Sarrace- 
nia from the top, tunnels up from the bottom 
through the stalk and greedily devours her 
entire store. 

If the reader has ever walked on an ocean 
beach, he has thoughtlessly trodden on small 
flattened balls, empty within, and covered with 
spines without. These are dead sea-urchins; 
which, when living, moved over the shallow 
sea-bottoms ; and which, now dead and emptied 
of the flesh within, the tide has tossed out upon 
the sands. Take one up, and look well at its 
perforated shell-case and at its ugly bristles. 
You say, " It is not so beautiful as a boy's agate 
marble, and not near so intricate as a French 
clock or a Dresden music-box." Ah ! is it not ! 
Then shut the eye of sense and look with the 
eye of science. You can read the secret of the 
clock or of the music-box, even with your eye 
of sense ; and the ingenuity once mastered, you 
shall soon come down to raw brass and steel. 
But even the eye of science will fail to solve 
the secret of this sea-urchin. You may muse 
upon it a thousand years and not get behind its 
veil of mystery. The secret of the universe is 
in it. 

This globular shell, it is really three hundred 



THE MYSTERY OF NATURE. 39 

plates of shell, deftly cemented together. Nay, 
it is not shell at all, but rather an airy lace- 
work of calcareous fibre, porous as blotting- 
paper. And these two thousand spines that 
beset the surface, and give it so formidable an 
aspect: take but a magnifying-glass and you 
shall find them tall elegant columns, tapering 
upward and fluted like the pillars of some old 
Grecian temple. Indeed, under the micro- 
scope, this rough exterior becomes the ruins of 
a Doric temple, the columns lying one upon an- 
other in the confusion of some earthquake- 
shaken ancient site. 

Cut a thin section directly across one of these 
fluted pillars, and examine the structure within. 
Before you is a very beautiful object, ring 
within ring : first, a ring of marble disks, and 
then a ring of lace-work — marble disks and lace- 
work from circumference to hollow center, all 
tinged with rich purple. The column is a 
series of cylinders — of rods alternating with 
lace-work. 

These columns are, in a sense, legs for the 
urchin, at their base shapen into cups, and fit- 
ting exactly upon spherical knobs on the shell,, 
upon which by ball-and-socket movement they 
are worked by powerful muscles. Moreover, 
there are ten rows of minute perforations in 
the shell-case, making in all several thousand 



40 THE OUTERMOST RIM, 

tiny pin-holes, from which, when the animal is 
alive, long flexible members are protruded, 
some with an elegant disk of marble lace-work for 
adhesion, and others with powerful jaws for 
seizure. 

In short, the odd little sea-urchin, crawling 
over the shallow marine bottoms, feeding on 
corallines and shell-fish, hints at far more than 
is arrived at in the philosophy of the wisest of 
us. How did all this prodigality of beauty and 
of marvel come about ? Whose thought does it 
utter, and for what purpose ? 

The microscopic anatomy of the human body 
is full of surprises for us. 

Every time one enjoys a sunset, as the gaze 
rests for a moment upon the setting orb, a ray of 
light enters the eye. But imagine the speed of 
its introduction. For each second of such vision, 
a beam of sunshine 190,000 miles long slides into 
the eye-ball, and discharges itself upon the 
retina. This beam is a vibration of ether (?) 
and enters the organ of sight in the form of 
waves and breaks upon the retina, as the ocean 
upon the sea-shore, in a sort of ethereal surf. 
During one second of vision, not less than five 
hundred millions of millions of light waves 
dash into the eye and beat against its breast- 
work of nerves. And this breastwork of nerves 



THE MYSTERY OF NATURE, 4 \ 

is composed (according to Salzer) of 438,000 
fibers and 3,360,000 cones. 

A bundle of human muscle no thicker than 
a little finger is composed of at least fifteen 
thousand fibers, each with its own arteries and 
nerves. Every one of these fibers is itself a 
strand composed of thousands of minute fibrils ; 
while each fibril is a roll of disks, of which 
there are seventeen thousand to the inch. And, 
for all we know to the contrary, each of these 
infinitesimal disks may be a whole world of 
complexity, variety, and beauty. A bundle of 
muscular fiber one inch long and half an inch 
in diameter will thus contain about 15,000 
fibers, 30,000,000 fibrils, and 510 billions of 
disks, not to speak of the capillary vessels and 
nerves, that feed and control all this wonderful 
machinery. 

Every time one breathes, over five hundred 
millions of air-cells are inflated, and five hun- 
dred millions of networks of capillary vessels 
send their blood-disks along, purified, vitalized, 
dancing for joy. 

Such statements might be continued until the 
reader wearied of magnitudes and incomprehen- 
sibilities. The telescope and the microscope 
only push out the Outermost Rim; they leave 
infinite mystery beyond on every side. 



42 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

Or if, leaving the outer world, we look with- 
in, and study that mind which, as Wordsworth 

says, 

" Builds for aye," 

there is no release for astonishment. 

What is this intelligence that flashes from the 
eye, and on the tongue vocalizes itself in uttered 
thought ? What is this taste that devises images 
of beauty, and clothes the world with pleasing 
contrast and harmony, and finds in the story of 
man material for comedy and tragedy ? What 
is this wild throbbing of the heart, this weari- 
ness, this despair, this hope and ambition, this 
hate, this love ? 

And when Death lays his chill hand upon 
this frame, and the body lies stiff and cold, 
whither has flown intelligence and taste and 
emotion ? Where now is the glorious flash of 
the eye, the ardent curvings of the lips, and all 
the lines and graces of vital motion inspired of 
thought and robed in beauty. Alas! hushed 
are the winded words — 



a^ 



" Life and thought have gone away side by side, 
Leaving door and windows wide, 
Careless tenants they ! " 

O mystery fathomless ! And, like the living 
cell, comparatively unexplored ; for every age 
shows man to himself a more wonderful crea- 



THE MYSTERY OF NATURE. 43 

tion. As Pope wisely wrote, " The proper study 
of mankind is man." Go to the libraries, visit 
the picture-galleries, scan human society, review 
human history, look into your own soul, and 
ponder perception and memory and imagina- 
tion and desire and conscience and will, hope 
and fear, love and hate! Is not intelligent ex- 
istence the snow-white peak of Nature's loftiest 
pinnacle ? Forgetting here aught else, we are 
tempted to adopt Sir "W. Hamilton's lecture- 
room motto, and to say, " There is nothing 
great in the world but man, and nothing great 
in man but mind." 

Consider, for instance, that very wonderful, 
fact, noticed by all thoughtful men, that many 
of the most valuable of our mental results can 
not be traced back to any conscious act of 
knowledge, to any conscious process of reason- 
ing, or to any conscious outburst of artistic 
frenzy. There seems at times to work within 
us a lawless imagination — a sort of demoniac 
artist, that paints without materials, without 
effort, and with results often of surpassing 
brilliancy. There is a discernment of facts 
which apparently have not been learned, a divi- 
nation of future contingencies or a solution of 
problems which seems without explanation and 
akin to the insight of the seer, or some strange 
and wonderful combination of fictitious ele- 



44 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

ments into dramatic pose, flashing on the soul 
like a vision of revelation. Thus suddenly will 
be thrown upon the mental canvas, from some 
invisible stereopticon, a fact or event of which 
the mind has no conscious memory. We say 
to ourselves, this surely is but some figment of 
fancy, a fragment of some day-dream ; yet it 
is vivid enough to be true. And, sure enough, 
by and by it proves to have occurred. The 
mind, by some hidden process, had taken 
knowledge of what never came into conscious- 
ness ; and now the fact which thus had stolen 
into memory comes forth with boldness. Rea- 
soning processes of the most elaborate kind 
will go on without any consciousness of 
them, and suddenly the mind has accepted 
of conclusions which seem utterly bereft of 
premises, — foundlings that no mental effort 
will own. Problems that puzzle will sud- 
denly lose their obscurity ; and there will 
appear on the mental blackboard the solu- 
tion clearly chalked out. Says O. W. Holmes : 
" I question whether persons who think most — 
that is, have most conscious thought pass 
through their minds — necessarily do most 
mental work. The tree you are sticking in will 
be growing when you are sleeping. So with 
every new idea that is planted in a real 
thinker's mind : it will be growing when he is 



THE MYSTERY OF NATURE. 45 

least conscious of it. An idea in the brain is 
not a legend carved on a marble slab : it is an 
impression made on a living tissue, which is the 
seat of active nutritive processes. Shall the 
initials I carved in bark increase from year to 
year with the tree ? and shall not my recorded 
thought develop into new relations with my 
growing brain % " 

Yery many of the greatest discoveries of 
science or of the most wonderful inventions 
of mechanics have come thus as images, long 
ere proved to be correct by evidence. The 
mind, outrunning the slow course of investiga- 
tion, has worked out the result, ere even the 
thinker, — much less the thinking world in gen- 
eral, — has been able to convince himself of its 
soundness. Much of what we call insight into 
character, forecast of the future, business capac- 
ity, judgment, common sense, intuition, tact 
and taste, is simply this automatic working of 
the mind, which hides its processes and reveals 
only its results. And demonology of old found 
a stronghold, and now has explanation, in this 
occult mental activity. 

This unconscious cerebration has been beau- 
tifully likened to the " innumerable waves that 
travel by night, unseen and in silence, over the 
broad expanse of an ocean. Consciousness may 
bear some analogy to the sheen and roar of the 



46 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

breakers, where a single line of waves is lashed 
into a foam on the shores that obstruct their 



And is it not a wonderful ocean, whether 
calm or disturbed, whether silent or in uproar, 
in darkness or broken into white foam, — this 
" vasty deep " of the human mind ? 



CHAPTEE IV. 

THE WORLD'S SHADOW. 

1 ' We look before and after, 
And pine for what is not ; 
Our sincere st laughter 

With so?ne pain is fraught ; 
Our sweetest songs are those 
That tell of saddest thought" 

— Shelley. 

Nearly two thousand years ago, in one of 
the most lovely landscapes on earth, there rose 
a proud Roman city. The blue ocean in the 
foreground approached almost near enough to 
wash its walls ; and behind its gates and towers 
arose a verdure-clad mountain. To right and 
left the green shores came out to sea and formed 
a picturesque bay. Far away through the sum- 
mer haze were to be discerned the dreamy out- 
lines of hills. Villas, embowered in the gray 
foliage of olives and in the lustrous dark green 
of orange and lemon groves, lined the shores. 
Vineyards climbed the slopes and to the very 
mountain-peak, and gardens luxuriated in the 
seldom-interrupted sunshine of perpetual sum- 
mer. A river, fed by fountains back among 

(47) 



48 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

the hills, flowed through the dense vegetation 
and babbled by the city's walls. 

Probably a more calm and beautiful landscape 
was not to be seen of mortal eyes on all the 
earth. And the people of Pompeii were serene 
on that day, and the gay city was all out in gala 
dress. Business was suspended, save only em- 
ployment of necessary provision. The public 
ovens were filled with bread ; the wine-shops 
were open for tardy countrymen strolling in ; 
women and children were, in many instances, 
in the tessellated courts of their houses, seated 
beside the fountain and under the silken awn- 
ing ; while at the open gates stood soldiers with 
sword and spear. But the great mass of the 
inhabitants, both men and women, gentry and 
mob, were seated on the stone benches of the 
amphitheatre, eagerly following the murderous 
strokes of gladiators, who fought in the oval 
arena below. Except for the wretches who 
were dying upon the bloody sands, it was a 
scene of gay costume, merry banter and general 
festivity. 

Suddenly there was a sound of gurgling in 
the throat of the green mountain, a cloud passed 
over the sun, the heavens blackened into mid- 
night ; and there came down upon the city a 
shower of sulphur and ashes. And then fell 
burning cinders of molten stone, a storm of fire- 
flakes penetrated by rocky hail. 



THE WORLD'S SHADOW. 49 

Forth from the great amphitheatre, through 
its many openings for exit, streamed the terri- 
fied crowd. Some hurried to the gates and 
to the sea-shore: some stopped to find their 
children in their burning homes : some delayed 
to seize the precious things long since hoarded 
away. Many died, suffocated or burned to 
death, in the streets. Whole families were en- 
tombed alive in their own vaults. Here sinks the 
priest, who, having cut his way through two solid 
Avails, perishes ere he can open the third. See 
this wretch, as he falls back upon the pavement 
of the street, clutching his bag of gold and 
silver coins ; that doubtless has stayed his flight, 
and so robbed him of his life. And here, in the 
beautiful house of the poet, whose walls are so 
superbly frescoed in elegant designs, behold 
these dainty ladies that care more for adornment 
than for safety, and who stop to gather up their 
jewels, and in the effort die. In this wine- 
cellar of the rich Dioined, women and children, 
clasped into one another's arms, breathe out 
their last in statuesque horror. The mule in 
the bakery, the horses in the tavern, this goat 
with beli on his collar that has vainly thrust its 
head into an opened oven to escape the tempest 
of fire, and yonder prisoners in the pillory, 
perish not more helplessly. And see this mother 
clutching her babe to her bosom and huddling 
4 



50 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

into a tomb, only to be walled in by the ashes 
and rock. And then this hero at the Hercula- 
neum gate, this sentinel brave and calm, that 
lowers not his proud head nor leaves his post, 
but dies on duty, erect, spear in hand. 

And so Pompeii disappeared beneath the 
ashes of the great eruption, and grass and forest 
trees, and vineyards and olive-yards grew upon 
its site to mock its memory ; until modern re- 
search, inquisitive to know all things, dug out its 
streets and courts, uncovered its painted walls, 
and brought to view the bones of its victims. 
And Pompeii, to-day, immortalized by destruc- 
tion, welcomes every traveller to its ruins. The 
ruts in roadways, the crocks in wine-shops, the 
seribblings of boys upon the walls, the very 
bread from the public ovens burnt to charcoal, 
are all there for any one to see and ponder. 

And Pompeii is not alone in its pitiful appeal 
to the reason and the heart. Indeed, we have 
recalled that day of horror, only because history 
and research have combined to make this par- 
ticular picture of human woe vivid. Any one 
may take up the daily newspapers, and in oft- 
recurring conflagrations of theatres and hotels, 
in railroad collisions, and in disasters at sea, 
may read the same ghastly story of security, 
merriment, catastrophe and destruction, mock- 
ed by a hurried paragraph of description, and 



THE WORLD'S SHADO W. 5 \ 

liable only, by chance, to the poor immortality 
of recollection among the future memories 
of mankind. And were great public disasters 
to fail, private sorrows innumerable, — pestilence 
ever lurking somewhere, and want, pain and 
death, — would call attention, with keenest em- 
phasis, to the World's Shadow. 

How many stories, like this that follows, voice 
the sadness of the human heart : A thousand 
years ago there lived in Persia a poet of genius, 
who, by his immortal verse, rose to the highest 
eminence. At the bidding of King Mahmoud 
he wrote a great epic " Book of Kings " of sixty 
thousand verses, for each verse of which he was 
to have in payment a gold piece. Firdousi was 
not covetous ; and he longed only to be a public 
benefactor. It seems that his native town was 
subject to overflow. So he resolved to build a 
great dyke with his golden pieces ; that all his 
fellow-citizens might share in his earnings, and 
bless his kind heart and open hand. So he 
labored in poverty and privation, refusing to 
receive any of the promised pay until all was 
earned. When, however, after years of supreme 
effort the work was done, Mahmoud repented 
of his generosity, and, instead of gold, sent 
silver to the poet. Firdousi was in the public 
bath when the elephant arrived that bore the 
three sacks of silver. On discovering the fraud, 



52 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

the great man's heart was broken, his dreams of 
public good dissolved; and, enraged beyond 
control, scornfully he gave one sack of treasure 
to the messenger that brought it, the second he 
bestowed on the bath-keeper, and the last he 
paid for a glass of beer. Then sending the 
false monarch a bitter rebuke in verse, he fled 
the land. Years went by. Long after, Mah- 
moud, his conscience ill at ease, forwarded an 
ample apology, a robe of honor and one hun- 
dred thousand pieces of gold, beseeching the 
poet to come back to his capital. But as the 
camels entered the city where Firdousi had 
found asylum at one gate, the funeral proces- 
sion of the poet, dead of grief, was leaving the 
city by another. 

And those who saw, said : "Vanity of vani- 
ties : all is vanity ! " And all who read are 
tempted to murmur, with the poet's voice of 
doubt — 

M All things are shows, 
And vain the knowledge of their vanity ; 
Thou dost but chase the shadow of thyself! 
Rise and go hence: there is no better way 
Than patient scorn ; — nor any help for man ! " 



It is the fundamental doctrine of Buddhism, 
that life is an evil intolerable. The best gift virtue 
can confer upon a holy man is that, when he dies, 



THE WORLD'S SHADO W. 53 

he shall not be born again, but sink into bliss- 
ful, unconscious, eternal sleep. "Anywhere, 
anywhere, out of the world," was for ages the 
<jry of the holiest men of one of the greatest 
moral movements the world has ever seen. 

It is significant that the poets, who, by reason 
of their genius, are gifted to drink most deeply 
of the wine of life, have very generally formed 
melancholy views of human existence. A whole 
volume of sadness is breathed into Shelley's 
couplet — 

" Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity." 

Even the gentle Longfellow sings mournfully — 

''Life hath quicksands, 
Life hath snares ! " 

To one bard, life's 

.... " A tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing." 

It is " a cheat," " a dull round," " a span," " an 
empty dream," "a fitful fever," "tedious as a 
twice-told tale." These phrases are proverbial. 
And must we conclude that man is the prod- 
uct and plaything of the gigantic forces of 
Nature, that now work in harmony to bring 
about beauty and joy, and ere long collide in 



54 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

terrific onset, in earthquakes, in pestilences, in 
the submersion of continents, and in the confla- 
gration of worlds ? 

And is there no more of it ? Is life only con- 
tinuous sensation, troubled matter come to sor- 
rowful consciousness, — momentary knowledge 
of a mystery incomprehensible ? Is death the 
end of the wild drama ? It was Coleridge who 
wrote the lines — 

" The stilly murmur of the distant sea 
Tells us of silence." 

Can it be true that, after all, the rustle of life is 
but that stilly murmur of Eternity that tells of 
silence ? Shall wit and wisdom offer no solace 
for human ills but the moan of the poet Mos- 
chus, as sweetly and sadly he chants his dirge 
over his brother-poet, Bion : 

" Woe ! woe ! The mallows, when they 
perish in the garden, and the green parsley, 
and the blooming, crisp-leaved anise, after a 
season live again, and year by year they grow 
anew ; but we — great and strong and wise men 
— when once we have died, we sleep forgotten 
in the hollowed earth, the long, long, endless 
sleep from which we never shall awake ! M 



PART II. 
VOICES FROM BEYOND. 



CHAPTER V. 

HINTS OF GOD IN PHYSICAL NATURE. 

1 ' He who will Idok steadfastly out into the world, will 
perceive himself surveyed by a great eye returning his stare" 
— R. W. Emerson. 

The reader's attention, in this chapter, is 
called to a vastly-important series of suggestions 
in the physical world, that urge the mind to 
contemplation of an Ultimate Thinker. 

And, first, let it be carefully noted and mused 
upon, that in the study of Nature we discover 
a thoughtfulness like our own, though farther- 
reaching and superior. 

This has been the constant, inevitable infer- 
ence of all that we have shown in the first and 
interrogatory portion of this work. We have 
pondered upon inconceivable distances and 

(55) 



56 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

rapidities, upon the marvels of growth, life and 
upon the play of organisms, and upon the intri- 
cacies of the human mind. We have seen that 
each science opens to view a whole universe of 
wonders, which at once expands into the infinite 
and diminishes into the infinitesimal. And we 
have found, not only an exclamation point over 
against every fact, but as well a mark of inter- 
rogation. Everywhere we have encountered 
thought, even in senseless plants, and we have 
puzzled ourselves with the question, Whose 
Thought ? And we must have been forced again 
and again to the conclusion of Ja^mes Martineau : 
" Unless it takes more mental faculty to con- 
strue a Universe than to cause it, to read the 
Book of Nature than to write it, we must more 
than ever look upon its sublime face as the 
living appeal of thought to thought ! " 

And if any now object to our applying a 
word descriptive of the mental processes to the 
mysterious Somewhat in Nature that causes and 
conditions, let it be farther considered that 
human intelligence, studying the world, finds 
therein anticipated precisely its own thoughts. 

All man's devices seem to have been antici- 
pated, and long before there were any conscious 
thinkers. 

To illustrate, take the vaunted triumphs of 
our mechanical skill. The workman justly is 



HINTS OF GOD IN PHYSICAL NATURE. 57 

proud of his tool-chest, whereby the dexterity 
of his deft fingers is multiplied many times. 
But there is not one tool of them all that has 
not been somehow acquired by animated creat- 
ures. The idea, at least, of each kind of instru- 
ment has long ago been utilized by beetles, ants, 
butterflies and beasts small and great. 

Monkeys made suspension-bridges, and ants 
dug tunnels and erected arched ways and domed 
houses, before ever a civilized man trod the 
earth. 

The shipwright builds a vessel, and the mar- 
iner sails the Deep in proud consciousness of 
dominion over the physical world ; does he 
reflect that, ages upon ages ago, the tiny argo- 
naut glided over the waves in an airy skiff of 
pearl? Corrugated sheet-iron for cars and other 
purposes requiring combined strength and light- 
ness, is a recent device ; but in the body of the 
cuttle-fish, from the morning of time, just this 
principle, far more elegantly developed, secures 
these desirable qualities for a hard structure 
within serving for skeleton. The principle of 
the steam-engine, — fuel converted into power, 
— is the principle of all animated action in 
Nature — of walking, swimming, flying and 
working, — only the fuel with an animal is called 
food. 

How inventors strain their resources and their 



58 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

wits to fabricate a flying-machine : even the 
heavy goose mocks at them. A carrier-pigeon 
has been known to outspeed the swiftest ex- 
press trains. What ingenuity has been expend- 
ed upon the art of forcing water up to elevated 
positions. The suction-pump gives out at thirty- 
four feet above the well, and all other con- 
trivances to supply its defects are simply meth- 
ods of pushing the fluid up by main force. But 
the giant pines of California and the blue gum 
trees of Australia draw the sap from their roots 
up four hundred feet and more to their topmost 
twigs ; — we have yet to learn how. 

Agriculture is generally supposed to be a 
purely human art ; yet there is a race of ants in 
Texas that prepares a plot of ground, and sows, 
cultivates and reaps a kind of grain. 

As we have observed in our third chapter, 
even plants anticipate man's thoughts, quite as 
though possessed of consciousness. We entrap 
flies with honey. So does the Pitcher Plant, 
the Venus Fly-trap, and other similar growths. 
Our frontiersmen set gins, dig pits, and use 
various devices to secure game for their sub- 
sistence. These plants all are regular trappers, 
and live on their catches. 

Turning from mechanical arts to our boasted 
fine arts, the general fact we are illustrating 
again vividly appears. The larks sang, and the 



HINTS OF GOD IN PHYSICAL NATURE. 59 

violets bloomed, and the forests murmured and 
waved, and landscapes were beautiful and 
grand, and the stars made music in their spheres, 
when our ancestors were barbarians, seeing 
naught — hearing naught — of beauty. We our- 
selves are only, — like the merchant of the 
Arabian Nights in the palace, — getting our eyes 
used to the splendors of our surroundings. Well 
wrote Lamartine of the beautiful in art : " Man, 
after all rarely invents anything he remembers." 
Creative art is but unusual insight into Nature's 
lovelier thoughts, and skilful combination of 
them. 

Or will we teach Nature our science ? Our 
science! Nature knows it all, practices it all, 
and has laboratories and museums, lenses and 
scalpels. The chemist boasts to the skies if he 
succeed in making but one of those many or- 
ganic substances — as sugar, starch or oil ; which 
Nature, in her living cells, is manufacturing 
with greatest ease, precision and prodigality. 
The galvanic battery is a very great triumph of 
human ingenuity ; yet most powerful batteries 
have been for ages actively at work in the Elec- 
tric eel, in the Torpedo fish. 

But it is not necessary farther to enlarge upon 
this fact. Physical Nature knows chemistry, 
mechanics, geometry, nay, all sciences and all 



£f) THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

practical and fine arts. And the wiser man 
grows the more will he become convinced that 
Nature is before him in all his thoughts ; and, 
at last, he can only conclude that the summit of 
human science and art is, after all, but knowl- 
edge of Nature's alphabet. 

It is, therefore, no stretching of inference to 
declare boldly that there is thought in the 
physical world, and of a character analogous, 
and yet superior, to man's. We may sing with 
a recent English poet : 

u To sit on rocks, to muse on flood and fell, 

To slowly trace the forest's shady scene, 
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell, 

And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been. 
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen, 

With the wild flock that never needs a fold, — 
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean, — 

This is not solitude ; 'tis but to hold 

Converse with Nature's charms and view her stores 
unrolled." 

There is no solitude in Nature, but voices 
many that challenge the intelligence of the loft- 
iest minds and quicken the spirituality of the 
purest hearts. 

But who or what is this Intelligence ? What 
or who thinks these thoughts ? 



HINTS OF GOD IN PHYSICAL NATURE. gj 

Are there not other hints in the physical 
world to qualify the Ultimate Thinker ? There 
are several of great significance. 

After the first astonishment consequent upon 
the discovery of one's own thoughts everywhere, 
the observant and pensive student of Nature 
perceives other great facts. 

(2.) One finds unbroken succession in Nature. 
It is an old proverb which, while it explains 
nothing, at least states much, that "Nature 
abhors leaps." 

We speak of months and years ; but duration 
knows nothing of intervals. Time glides on 
and Nature glides on. We have our midnight 
and noon ; but the sun nowhere begins and 
nowhere ends in its daily circuit. Sunrise for 
Boston or New York is sunset for Asia ; sunset 
for Boston or New York is dawn over the Pa- 
cific. Our seasons mark no sudden transition. 
Nature, in her succession of seed-time, blossom- 
time and harvest, glides onward at her own 
chosen pace. 

Even our years are purely conventional. No 
monument in space marks the arrival of our 
earth at any special turning-point in its orbit. 
The earth whirls forward in its circuit to-mor- 
row as to-day, to-day as yesterday ; and sun and 
planets roll on forever through space. Nothing 
is without cause, nothing without effect. 



62 



THE OUTERMOST RIM. 



Human history has epochs, made by violent 
insurrections and revolutions; and we term 
these the beginnings of eras. But the sharpness 
of the turning-point is largely our own inability 
to grasp the causes in conjunction with the 
effects. Could the historian study the long de- 
tails of preparation, he would find his epoch 
very much like other points of time, the logical 
consequent of what has gone before. 

The science of geology is at present forcing 
the same facts upon our attention. Fifty years 
ago geologists insisted upon the most violent 
upheavals and disruptions as necessary to ex- 
plain the record of the rocks in the story of the 
early prime, but to-day they ask rather for 
time. They find evidence to believe that the 
earth, during prehistoric ages, was subject to 
conditions similar, in the main, to those pro- 
ducing results to-day ; and they admit that 
movements were then, as now, in unbroken 
sequence. 

Thus seons, eras, centuries, years, months, 
days, hours and minutes are but the terms of 
our incapacity to grasp the whole of Nature's 
advance, words of convenience and usage, 
uttered from a human stand-point, to describe 
the seemino; stages of Nature's ceaseless flow. 



(3.) Moreover, there is observable in Nature 



HINTS OF GOD IN PHYSICAL NATURE. 63 

Persistency of Law, The same atoms, the 
same forces and identical laws prevail forever ! 
Nature's sequence is not only unbroken, it is 
consistent with itself. 

There is to-day on our Atlantic shores a 
species of bivalve belonging to a genus (Lin- 
gula) found in our oldest geological formations. 
When the world first emerged from chaos, on 
the pebbly sea-bottoms were shell-fish all but 
identical in form and manner of life with some 
that any child may to-day find on the sea-beaches 
after a storm. The author has in his minera- 
logical cabinet specimens of Isle La Motte 
Monumental — a dark marble from the Lower 
Silurian — which, when cut in sections for the 
microscope, is shown to be composed of water- 
worn tests of rhizopods and the hard parts of 
zoophytes, etc. ; each tiny fossil suggestive of 
what any collector may find in the proper 
localities to-day. The conditions remaining the 
same, in these instances the type has persisted 
for millions of years. When sunlight first pene- 
trated the primaeval vapors to fertilize the earth, 
it travelled at the same swift speed as to-day. 
Heat, electricity, magnetism and gravity all 
obeyed the laws, which are now, one by one, 
revealing themselves to the patient discoverer. 
Through all these ages never an atom of any 
substance has increased or decreased in weight, 



g4 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

never a force varied its mechanical equivalent^ 
never a physical Jaw failed of its working. 
There have been no mistakes, no reconsidera- 
tions,, no abandonments, but inevitable relent- 
less operation. 

(4). Finally, Nature, in her successive forms, 
shows & progress of thought. While the atoms 
and the forces and the laws never vary, the re- 
sulting forms, infinitely manifold, rise with the 
ages in the scale of being. The ages, when we 
make them speak for themselves, in the record 
of the rocks or upon the pages of history, tell 
of a steady onward flow. This, in its general 
bearing upon an expanding human civilization, 
we have already, in the second chapter, amply 
enlarged upon. The fact concerns us, at this 
point, in its bearings upon the question of a 
Cause and its nature. 

No intelligent man to-day questions the fact 
of some general progress of things in Nature 
and in History. The word most often on the 
lips of the scientist is that term which covers so 
much ignorance, and yet recalls such wondrous 
discoveries, — Evolution. Name the progress of 
life evolution, development or what you will, 
it is not fortuitous but methodical, the utterance 
of sublimest intelligence. 

This progress of thought is not strictly con- 



HINTS OF GOD IN PHYSICAL NATURE, (55 

secutive, but, if we may use the figure, genea- 
logical. The evolution or development or con- 
secution of natural life has been much like the 
growth of a tree, at first a mere cell, and then a 
root and a trunk, — the trunk dividing into 
limbs, the limbs into branches, the branches into 
boughs, the boughs into stems and the stems 
into twigs. And this division has not been 
evenly, but according to advantage of position. 
Here and there a limb has died out, here and 
there a branch is more than commonly vigor- 
ous and yonder are stems that have been stunt- 
eel ; some boughs are in the sunshine and some 
in the shadow, some receive more sap than 
others, and some more heat, and some more 
moisture ; and the best fruit may be on a lower 
limb. But, on the whole, the tree ever rises 
and ever divides, clearly showing a general 
progress. 

Let us now recapitulate. We have found 
thought everywhere, and anticipations even of 
our own particular devisings. We have seen 
that events occur, with the physical world, in 
unbroken succession, and that Nature's laws are 
invariable and forever persistent, and further- 
more that there is clearly manifest, with the 
roll of the ages, a progress of thought in the evo- 
lution of forms. 
5 



QQ TUB O U TERM O ST RIM. 

Must we not now conclude that the physical 
Universe is one and simple, and say with the 
poet: 

" Yet I doubt not, through the ages one increasing 
purpose runs " ? 

And are we not forced to infer that the Thinker 
of Mature is One and Simple ? And do we not 
learn that whatever and whoever the Ultimate 
Thinker may be, the workings of the Intelli- 
gence are consecutive, according to foreordained 
Law, and progressively unfolding — in short, 
rigidly methodical, and the method infinite in 
its reach and eternal in its persistency ? So far, 
the Mystery of Nature is perfectly simple ; and 
amid all the confusion of countless startling 
facts is heard at all times and everywhere a 
clear, loud voice from Beyond, proclaiming an 
Intelligent Thinker, over all, back of all and 
in all. 

And we must muse with Wordsworth : 

"For I have learned 
To look on Nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes 
The still sad music of humanity, 
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
A Presence, that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime 



HINTS OF GOD IN PHYSICAL NATURE. Qf 

Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns 
And the round ocean and the living air 
And the blue sky and in the mind of man, 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, 
And rolls through all things." 



CHAPTEE VI. 

HINTS OF GOD EST THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN. 

1 ' None can escape the Presence ! The Ought is every- 
where and imperative. Alike guilt hi the soul and anguish 
in the flesh attest his ubiquity." — Bronson Alcott. 

In the last chapter we listened to the Voices 
from Beyond, audible in Physical Nature. Let 
us now hearken to what of suggestiveness there 
may be in the moral nature of man. 

The Ultimate Thinker has a witness in con- 
science, whose testimony is worthy of utmost 
respect ; of whom, if we interrogate, we learn 
three great truths. 

First, that men have a sense of right and wrong 
and form clear moral judgments. Certain kinds 
of action and certain states of mind, by a mental 
and moral necessity, range themselves under the 
ideas of right and wrong. 

Not always, to be sure, correctly, not always 
consistently. Any particular judgment may be 
faulty, and two judgments may contradict one 
(68) 



GOD IN THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN. 69 

another ; but the bare sense of moral quality is 
ever present. 

Men and women are very near-sighted in 
questions of probity, and their judgments are 
apt to be biased by their interests ; but even at 
their worst they are beings of moral percep- 
tions. This is all that is claimed. 

But this bare sense of right and wrong is a 
great advance, it will be noticed, upon the ideas 
of the physical world, and fairly lifts man into 
a kingdom by himself. 

To be sure, there are some who urge an in- 
cipient moral sense for dogs, horses, apes and 
other intelligent animals, and who Believe that 
these may, in some instances, have suffered vir- 
tuous remorse and shame. Possibly this may be 
the case ; but, if so, such conscientiousness can 
scarcely be more than a faintest anticipation of 
what we find in man, and very much as the in- 
telligence of the ant and the elephant foreshadow, 
in scarcely perceptible outlines, human philos- 
ophy and art. Undeniably the law of life for 
the brutes is the law of tooth and claw. To 
escape a stronger foe and to devour a weaker is 
the Golden Eule of beasts, both great and small. 
Most truthfully and lucidly has Darwin de- 
scribed the struggle for Existence, and named 
its method of action Natural Selection. 

And beyond question, man, as a mere animal, 



70 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

comes under the sway of these conditions ; but 
as a human being, thoughtful and moral, he 
rises above the teeth-gnashing and the law of 
might. 

Dr. Arthur Mitchell, in his recent work, on 
u What is Civilization ?" says that " Civilization 
is nothing more than a complicated outcome of 
a war waged with Nature by man in society, to 
prevent her from putting into execution, in his 
case, her law of Natural Selection." A higher law 
intervenes. The moral nature can not abide the 
principle that "might makes right": it sees 
beauty in self-denial, it gains through loss and 
it pronounces Selfishness the crimson sin. The 
history of human progress will show an ever 
more and more successful resistance to brutal 
instincts ; nay, this resistance is progress. Not, 
civilization produces morality ; but, morality is 
one of the prime causes of civilization. 

Hence you find morality among savages. 
Some instances may be of interest. 

Miss Bird, in her recent work on Japan, nar- 
rates a purchase from the aborigines of that 
country — the Ainos — of three knives with 
carved handles. She offered in payment $2.50. 
The savages, after consultation, decided that 
the articles were worth only $1.10, and they 
would take no more. 

From Henry Lansdell we learn, that the mer- 



GOD IN THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN. ^\ 

chants of Tobolsk, Siberia, when they go north, 
during the summer, to purchase fish of the Sam- 
oyedes and Ostyaks, take with them flour and 
salt for exchange. On their return they deposit 
and leave unprotected at their summer stations 
whatever of their goods may remain unsold. 
Should a native pass by during the winter and 
need supplies of these articles, he takes what he 
wants, but leaves instead a notched stick as a 
sort of promissory note. The next season, on 
the return of the merchant, due payment is 
made in fish. So keen is the moral sense that 
the dealer never has cause to complain of either 
theft or false reckoning. 

A. R. Wallace, in his " Malay Archipelago," 
gives a striking instance of honesty in a savage 
race, and under circumstances that favored dis- 
honesty. It was in collecting birds of paradise 
in a small island. It was the custom of traders, 
at that point, to pay in advance ; each native 
hunter agreeing to furnish birds according to 
the number of knives, hatchets, etc., received. 
On the eve of Wallace's departure, most of 
those who had taken prepayment, had already 
brought in what they had agreed to procure. 
One poor fellow had been so unfortunate as to 
secure nothing, and he had brought back the 
axe which had been advanced him. Another, 
who had agreed to bring six birds of paradise, 



72 THE OUTERMOST RIM, 

having delivered the fifth two days before, had 
hurried inland for the remaining one due. 
This man, up to the last moment, did not re- 
turn, and the boat was loaded and on the point 
of leaving when he came running down the 
beach holding up a bird, which he handed to the 
naturalist, saying with satisfaction, " Now I owe 
you nothing ! " 

Travellers occasionally denounce the savages 
among whom they move with feelings of lordly 
disdain, as not only immoral, but devoid of all 
sense of right and wrong. It must, however, be 
remembered how difficult it is to look at things 
from stand-points greatly removed from one's 
own ; and it is well to bear in mind that few 
travellers understand perfectly the languages of 
tribes among whom they make a brief sojourn. 
Moreover, it is known that savages have an in- 
stinctive shrinking from stating to persons on a 
higher plane of thought, their dark and foolish 
beliefs ; to say nothing of their mental incapac- 
ity to analyze and express their own emotions 
and abstract ideas. Trustworthy testimony of 
travellers and missionaries establishes the fact, 
that no human race exists without some, at least, 
feeble sense of right and wrong. 

Nor, indeed, is there evidence that any such 
race ever existed. Recent researches into the 
story of prehistoric man corroborate the univer- 



GOD IN THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN. f3 

sal teaching of tradition and written history. 
The moral nature of man was back of civiliza- 
tion, and is underneath society and government. 

And should it ever be proven that the human 
race were once brutal, and that ideas of right 
and wrong have sprang out of lower notions — 
as of the desirable and the dangerous — it would 
not at all follow, as some imagine and venture 
to hint, that the authority of conscience thereby is 
called in question, nor that the validity of moral 
judgments is shaken. In such a case the moral 
sense would still stand on the same sure foun- 
dation as Reason and Art ; and the right would 
be just as absolutely valid as the true and the 
beautiful. For instance, it would make no dif- 
ference with the laws of geometry, or with the 
facts of astronomy, that their discovery, and 
even that the faculty which discovered them, 
came, by slow evolution, from some lower form 
of intelligence. They are what we have found 
them to be. The Parthenon is no less beauti- 
ful as a temple, nor the Yenus of Milo as a 
statue, nor the Transfiguration of JRaphael as a 
painting, because Art was once the mere scrib- 
bling of hunting scenes upon the antler of a 
reindeer or the tusk of a hairy mammoth. 

And morals would be quite as binding, in 
theory and in practice, if they could be shown 
to have originated, like Science and Art, from 



74 THE OUTERMOST RIM, 

small beginnings. Things are not what they 
have been, if they were totally different, but 
what they have come to be. This is platitude, 
doubtless, but justified by the strange confusion 
existing in many able minds. Plato was once 
an unconscious, unborn babe ; but he had be- 
come a man of sublime intelligence when he 
wrote the Phaedrus and the Symposium. Shake- 
speare was once a mere infinitesimal droplet of 
protoplasm ; but he came to be, notwithstanding 
this, the supreme genius of English literature. 
It makes no difference, then, how the moral 
sense arose. It exists to-day, alongside of 
Keason and Taste, and its judgments have a 
validity analogous to that of the conclusions of 
the exact sciences or the canons of fine art. 

The important question in this connection is 
not, how did the moral sense arise, but what is 
its significance ? 

Surely it is fundamental in human nature, the 
corner-stone of civilization. So strong may it 
become, that it will subdue the most violent 
passions, deny the most eager desires, and brave 
torture' and death. It may work without any 
reference to reward or punishment, here or 
hereafter. The most wicked of men, who 
neither desire nor dread a future, may have 
the clearest perceptions of certain kinds of 
duty; and very often desire to do right has 



GOD IN THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN. 75 

brought delicate women and children deliber- 
ately to the sacrifice of all they held dear, in- 
cluding life itself. 

A touching story, illustrating the intense 
vividness moral judgments may attain, and 
their possible elevation above all considerations 
of selfish desire or fear, is told of the wife of 
Barneveldt, the grand pensionary of Holland. 

This eminent citizen of the young republic, 
in his old age was condemned to death for 
being an Arminian ; and in his gray hairs was 
beheaded by his enemy, Prince Maurice. His 
heroic wife beheld her husband suffer and die 
in the silence of a great indignation. Two 
sons survived. They conspired to avenge their 
father by assassinating the Prince ; but were 
detected, and one of them caught, and con- 
demned to the scaffold. Now the proud mother 
interceded. Said Maurice, the Prince : " How 
is it that you seek pardon for your son and did 
not for your husband % " She replied : " My 
husband was innocent, but my son is guilty ! " 
She could not beg a pardon for an innocent 
man — the condemned himself would have cried 
shame upon her; but her boy was become a 
manifest criminal, and could be saved not by 
appeal to justice, and only by suit for clemency. 

Now observe, in the second place, that when 



7t> THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

men come to act upon the notions of right or 
wrong, they find themselves free to choose, and 
the notion of personal guilt or innocence at- 
taches not only to their doings and feelings, but 
to themselves as well. They not only see the 
distinction between what is right and what is 
wrong ; but, yielding to this or to that alterna- 
tive, they become sensible that they themselves 
deserve praise or blame. Being free to choose, 
they come to have character, good or bad, and 
hold themselves, and are held by others, as in- 
nocent or guilty. We are free moral agents, 
and hence responsible. Of this we are clearly 
conscious, and all our judgments of men and 
all self-respect and self-contempt are founded 
upon it. 

Yet this statement needs to be carefully 
guarded. We are free only within very con- 
fined limits, and human accountability runs 
within narrow channels. When a man is 
brought to the judgment bar of absolute merit, 
many things are to be considered which the ne- 
cessities of any earthly court must rule out as 
irrelevant. 

Here is a vagabond who has committed a 
brutal crime. The minister of the Gospel, 
voicing the general sentiment of the com- 
munity, and deeming the felon a responsible 
being, from the pulpit points a moral with the 



GOD IN THE MORAL NATURE- OF MAN. 77 

man's hardened depravity. Whereupon a physi- 
cian shakes his head, and says, as the people go 
out of church, underbreath: "No! no! the 
man's brain is imperfect and his whole mental 
organization defective." The professional phi- 
lanthropist now appears in print in a weekly re- 
ligious newspaper, and writes, sorrowfully, of 
bad surroundings in childhood, — "the man has 
had no education, no occupation, and was trained 
in vice, and needs flowers, books and love ! " A 
belligerent political economist responds in a 
secular daily that the crime was to have been 
expected, — " so many addled eggs in a hundred, 
so many vagabonds in a thousand, and such an 
average of suicides and murders to be expected 
per month ! " Other correspondents cry shame 
upon this cold-blooded philosopher ; but a man 
of statistics runs to his rescue, and proves that 
crimes come and go like storms, and are probably 
connected with the fluctuation of the sun-spots ; 
and he avers that just now a criminal cyclone 
prevails. " Our vagabond is the victim of an 
epidemic, and has a touch of the murder-fever/' 
And at last the lawyer, in his defense before the 
jury, pleads "moral insanity." Now all these 
theorists have truth in what they say, though 
none the whole truth. 

The sphere of responsibility is circumscribed 



78 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

by the conditions, good and bad, of life ; and 
all these different advocates have just claim to 
patient hearing. 

Pascal said that " if Cleopatra's nose had been 
shorter, the face of the whole world would have 
been changed." If the Persians had beaten the 
Greeks at Marathon, if Caesar had not crossed 
the Eubicon, if Charles Martel had not defeated 
the Saracens in the battle of Tours, if Crom- 
well had but lived twenty years longer, if Na- 
poleon had not made his winter campaign in 
Russia, how different history might have read ! 
As nations, and even more truly as individuals, 
men are clearly the playthings of Destiny. 

Yet, clearly the Will chooses freely within 
its narrow limits. It may prefer evil; it may 
choose good ; it may act upon, or it may defy, 
the moral judgments of the mind. 

The method of this freedom is a very great 
mystery. It seems to involve an act of causa- 
tion, and in each determination a new begin- 
ning. It introduces into human affairs an ele- 
ment of caprice which, if the sphere of choice 
were less limited, might prove fatal to consist- 
ency, and might remove history from the domain 
of science. 

Any one may destroy a reputation that has 
cost a lifetime of education, of self-repression 
and of active virtue, by one single deed of folly. 



GOD IN THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN, 79 

A touch on the trigger of a pistol pointed at a 
neighbor may send him to his grave, bring sor- 
row and want into his home, make outcasts of 
his children, and as well bring the doer to a 
prison cell and to the scafiold. The swing of 
Boussakof's arm, on that bloody day at St. 
Petersburg, killed a Czar, dissipated a national 
illusion, created a numerous party of revolu- 
tionists, and is now shaking to its foundations a 
stable and ancient despotism. Recently a capi- 
talist of New York conveyed away five millions 
of dollars by a dash of his pen. A President, 
pondering over a bill of Congress of large finan- 
cial import, by his signature changes deep chan- 
nels of trade, and brings fortunes to many and 
ruin to thousands. More than one man in 
Europe could, in a day, nay, in a moment, 
ordain a general war, and entail upon the 
nations, by a mere caprice, wounds and death 
and impoverishment and desolation. At the 
battle of Trafalgar, as the British flagship, 
dashing into the French and Spanish fleet, 
silenced the Redoubtable, and then held her 
fire to receive surrender, as the smoke cleared 
away and revealed Nelson on the quarterdeck, 
glittering with the stars his heroism had won, 
only a touch on the trigger of a rifle in the 
French rigging, laid him low in his pride and 
robbed England of the bravest and greatest 
mariner that ever kinged it over the sea. 



80 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

All this is passing strange, but undeniable^ 
To will is critical. To will unwisely is fatal. 
It brings us to the Outermost Rim of human 
thought, and sets us deeply pondering what 
may be Beyond. 

But still another important truth concerning 
the workings of the moral sense is to be noted. 
Moral action leaves the deepest impress upon 
the character ; and long after the deed is done 
its results abide. If the action have been vile, 
there arises a persistent self -contempt and a lin- 
gering regretful memory : if it have been noble, 
there comes about self-respect and peaceful 
reminiscence. 

A King Richard, crowned, amid his army 
and still master of his realm, must exclaim : 
"O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict 
me." But a Paul, though imprisoned and pen- 
niless and awaiting death, says calmly : " I have 
all and abound." "I am now ready to be 
offered, and the time of my departure is at 
hand. I have fought a good fight, I have fin- 
ished my course, I have kept the faith. Hence- 
forth, there is laid up for me a crown of right- 
eousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, 
shall give me at that day ! " 

The villain may not always, like Richard the 
Third, come to his deserts ; he may deceive his 
fellows or overawe the ministers of justice or 



GOD JN THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN. 3 ]_ 

buy out the law ; but there sits a court within 
that can not so easily be cajoled nor terrified nor 
bribed, and he ever 

...••" Bears about 
A silent court of justice in his breast, 
Himself the judge and jury, and himself 
The prisoner at the bar, ever condemned." 

Many great works of fiction have owed their 
power and their fascination to the sway of 
this law. The popular tales of all peoples, 
from the Greek tragedies down, have been to 
no small degree the illustration of the inevitable 
sequences of virtue and vice. Immoral novel- 
ists, at the present day, do sometimes, in defi- 
ance of their innate sense of justice, write a 
romance in which vice triumphs and the villain 
is blessed ; but this simply expresses the cyn- 
icism of the narrator. Popular tales, that have 
voiced the common sense of the many, never 
have thus sinned against poetic justice. 

Witness the story of the Wandering Jew; 
which itself has wandered over the world and 
finds no rest. 

The narrative of the Flying Dutchman is also 
in point. A famous captain, mad to double the 
Cape of Storms, beaten back again and again, 
defied the powers of Heaven, appealed to the 
Devil and swore a mighty oath to persevere 
6 



82 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

throughout Eternity. The Devil took him at 
his word. The Captain doubled the Cape, but 
for his impiety was doomed to roam the seas 
forever, from pole to pole, his phantom vessel 
the terror of all mariners and the dreadful 
herald of shipwreck. 

A most interesting illustration of the sway of 
this law over the human imagination, appears 
in a passage of the " Inferno." Dante had stroked 
the locks of the beautiful Francesca, the daugh- 
ter of his friend G-uido, Lord of Ravenna ; 
when an innocent child she had sat on his lap 
in the good days of old. As a woman, she had 
sinned ; and with her betrayer she had gone to 
her account. And the great poet must needs 
meet the two in torment, still united, but now 
by a tie of infinite pathos in its common agony, 
— their punishment to be driven, driven for- 
ever of a tempest that bore them pitilessly 
along, on and on. One might have supposed 
that logic in this case would have faltered, and 
that loving pity had spread over, at least, his 
pet, the mantle of silence. But no ! Dante the 
poet was no longer any one's advocate, and only 
the stern prophet of Retribution. 

It w T ill be remembered that Pontius Pilate is 
said to have drowned himself in the Lake of 
Lucerne, after, for long, hiding his shame and 
sorrow in the recesses of Mount Pilatus. There is 



GOD IN THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN. 33 

a local belief, still potent in Switzerland, that a 
form is often seen to emerge from the water 
and to go through the motions of hand-washing. 
And, it is added, after the appearance of this 
awful spectre Mount Pilatus is wrapped in dark 
clouds, and a tempest of great fury rages. 

Similar legends have everywhere abounded, 
revealing a deep-seated law of remorse in human 
nature. 

But the law of conscious remorse is not all of 
it. Self-contempt or self-approbation work into 
the permanent character. The slightest actions 
or passions, that carry significance of right and 
wrong, permanently mould the character. Yice 
begets vulgarity, and virtue begets purity. A 
criminal is not only self-condemned and the up- 
right self-approved, it is also true, as the great 
poet has sung — 

" He that has light within his own clear breast, 
May sit i' the center and enjoy bright day ; 
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts, 
Benighted walks under the midday sun : 
Himself is his own dungeon.'' 

A Commodus, or a Caesar Borgia, or a Marat, 
alongside of a St. Caecilia, a Francis d'Assisi or 
a George Washington, show how low or how 
high human character may fall or rise. Ee- 
morse can be suppressed in time by the searing 



84 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

of conscience, and the peace of mind which a 
noble deed affords may pass away with forget- 
fulness of the action itself; but nothing can 
suppress a villainous nature nor obscure virtue. 
The soul is a tablet on which has been deeply 
engraven tokens of all deeds and feelings, good 
and bad ; and discernment of character is the 
truthful reading of these fatal hieroglyphs. You 
are what you have made yourself to be. Cir- 
cumstances condition the outer appearance of 
the person and the superficial display of the 
nature ; but responsible choice carves out the 
permanent moral character. 

To recapitulate : We have seen in the moral 
nature of men a sense of right and wrong, a 
freedom of the will enabling responsible choice, 
and a resulting consistent and permanent char- 
acter; and we have observed that this moral 
nature works without any necessary relation to 
civil courts of justice or to personal thought of 
future reward and punishment. 

We conclude, then, that the human conscience 
is as ultimate and absolute as science or art. 
There is a court within the breast and a code 
from Beyond and a sanction outside our control. 
And we are prepared to ask, what bearing this 
has upon the problem of the Ultimate Thinker 
and Natural Lawgiver of the Universe. 



GOD IN THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN, 85 

Is it not the hint of a Moral Government and 
of a Moral Governor, supreme over all justices 
and all courts ? 

Can the Ultimate Thinker be less than moral ? 
If all thoughts must be first his thoughts, shall 
less be said of moral judgments? He, the 
Thinker of the True and of the Beautiful, is he 
not also Thinker of the Good? 

And can the Natural Lawgiver be less than 
legislator for the human heart ? Shall the Guar- 
antee of Physics and Mechanics be less for 
virtue ? 

Man is free ; who gave him this marvellous 
power ? and what Divine Mystery Beyond does 
it reflect ? 

Man finds himself responsible, by a law with- 
in, — responsible to Whom ? and in view of 
Whose legislation ? 

Men often die, perfectly aware that they 
have not been punished for heinous sins ; nay, 
they may die in the commission of crime, yet 
the inevitable sense of guilt anticipates retribu- 
tion, even when the breath is leaving the body ; 
and the baldest materialism is ill at ease in the 
thought that the criminal may have escaped 
justice. What Tribunal Beyond, and what 
Judge of all the earth, shall vindicate the maj- 
esty of Right ? 



gg THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

Surely the conscience of man is a finger 
pointed up to a Righteous God. 

The Thinker and Natural Lawgiver of the 
Universe is also its Moral Governor, its Legis- 
lature, its Supreme Court and its Executive. 

And Shakespeare only stated the vigorous 
teaching of the inmost soul, when he said — 

M In the corrupted currents of this world, 
Offence's gilded hand may show by justice ; 
And oft 'tis seen, the wicked prize itself 
Buys out the law. But 'tis not so above ! 
There, is no shuffling, there the action lies 
In its true nature, and we ourselves compelled 
Even to the teeth and forehead of our fault, 
To give in evidence." 



CHAPTEE VII. 

THE TEACHINGS OF MAN'S RELIGIOUS NATURE. 

1 ' If we traverse the world, it is possible to find cities with- 
out walls, without letters, without kings, without wealth, 
without coin, without schools, without theatres ; but a city 
without a temple, or that practiseth not worship, prayers, and 
the like, no one ever saw." — Plutarch. 

The time has come to probe that logical ne- 
cessity which has forced us to the conclusions 
stated in the two preceding chapters. In our 
study of the Physical World why were we re- 
quired to infer a supreme Thinker and Law- 
giver, and in our study of man's moral nature 
why must we accept a Judge for the soul and 
a Celestial Court of Last Appeal? That we 
were so required, no well-balanced mind can 
long persuade itself to deny. But why might 
we not have said, Nature's thoughts come with- 
out thinking, and moral judgments arise with- 
out any fixed standard of right and wrong? 
We could have said it, and men do occasionally 
say it ; but Something within, deep in that 
Consciousness which lies back of all knowledge, 
would have laughed the foolish words to scorn. 

(87) 



88 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

There are some things the mind, by its ulti- 
mate structure, requires us to believe. They 
may be verbally denied, but the denial only 
argues that the objector is either mentally im- 
mature or mentally lacking. Of these, Per- 
sonal Existence is one. You can not prove that 
you exist, and some crazed philosophers have 
denied or questioned it ; but every man believes 
it, notwithstanding, and it is taken for granted 
in every word uttered, emotion felt or deed 
done. Personal Identity is another of these 
fundamental postulates of human intelligence. 
It can be proved only by reference to the sub- 
structure of the human mind. You are con- 
scious that you are, and have remained, your- 
self ; and this is all the account you can give of 
the matter. Should any acquaintance claim to 
have become some one else, should any public 
character declare himself another, — should, for 
instance, Hayes appear at the White House and 
demand recognition as President Garfield, — 
pity would be uppermost, and a lunatic asylum 
suggest itself as a fitting remedy for such mad- 
ness. 

We can not think, except under limitations 
of Time and Space; but try to prove that 
these ideas have objective validity, and any 
argument that can be framed, except appeal to 
mental necessity, must be insufficient. 



TEACHINGS OF MAN'S RELIGIOUS NATURE. g9 

•There is thus a substructure to human reason, 
undeniable, unquestionable and unprovable, a 
faculty of faith in ultimate things which fur- 
nishes laws to regulate thought. 

Wow, it is in this substructure of human in- 
telligence that the necessity for inferences from 
Nature to a Deity lies. 

For here, among ultimate things, is a clear 
faith in the Absolute, in a Something uncon- 
ditioned by time, space or aught that doth the 
universe inhabit. 

This Absolute is not a mere idea — no empty 
category of thought, any more than is Personal 
Existence and Identity, or Time and Space ; it 
is an intuition of Being. This is what makes 
it a regulative law of thinking. If it be not 
valid, then is nothing valid, — 

u The pillared firmament is rottenness, 
And earth's base built on stubble." 

Thinking requires, as one of its conditions, 
that we shall assume, back of the finite, an In- 
finite, and back of the conditioned, an Abso- 
lute. The Absolute is a sort of Firmament in 
thought, a majestic Overhead and Background 
for any philosophy. It can not be gotten rid 
of, any more than landscape can avoid its sky. 
Indefinitely extended space does not cover the 
notion of Infinity, and indefinitely prolonged 



90 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

time does not make out Eternity. Infinity and 
Eternity are incomposite and indivisible. Only 
the Absolute is Infinite and Eternal. The 
human mind postulates an Unconditioned Con- 
dition of all things, an Uncaused Cause of all 
things. And who else may be the Ultimate 
Thinker and Lawgiver of Nature and the Su- 
preme Court of the Soul but This? This is 
God. 

And hence atheism never makes lasting prog- 
ress, any more than do other fantastic and un- 
natural schemes of philosophy. This or that 
dull savage may ignore, or this or that crack- 
brained sage deny, a Deity; but directly the 
human mind comes true again to its intuition, 
and the folly does not spread. Indeed atheism, 
when sincere, is a form of idiocy. The atheist 
is mentally lacking. He may, in other regards, 
be a great genius ; but in this concern his mind 
is undeveloped, or perhaps totally at fault. As 
men are born lacking in mental or moral sense, 
so doubtless some fail of a religious nature. 
This proves only what may otherwise be learned 
in idiot asylums and State prisons : that the 
laws of inheritance at times work at cross pur- 
poses and produce but sorry results. 

But suppose some should argue, with reference 
to this mental necessity (as we saw in the last 
chapter, some have argued with reference to the 



TEACHINGS OF MAN'S RELIGIOUS NATURE. €}\ 

moral necessities of our natures) — suppose some 
should insist that man was once an ape, and 
that the belief in a God has grown up through 
lower forms of thought and is but a product of 
inherited brain structure modified by evolution, 
and hence of no real validity. 

We should reply, as in the matter of growth 
in moral ideas — for the problem is substantially 
the same — that there is no evidence of our race 
ever having been brutal, and that even granting 
this were so, the law of consciousness, though 
recently evolved, would still be valid, just as are 
laws of mathematics, of physics and of art, 
though recently perceived. Religion is just as 
little called in question, by its small beginnings, 
as art or science. You do not gauge Plato or 
Shakespeare at time of birth, but in their 
maturity. What the human mind was before 
it matured, is of as little interest to us, in this 
connection, as what Plato might have been ere 
he was born, or Shakespeare ere he learned to 
talk. 

The human mind is what it has come to be ; 
and as a regulator of thought, is most valuable 
to us in its most perfect development. 

That men were at first children, and that 
many men are now childish, must be granted. 
That the great masses of mankind never once 
in their lives think upon the Absolute, is unde- 



92 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

niable. This intuition of the Absolute belongs 
to the foundation, and henee is under ground 
and hidden out of sight, unless one descend into 
the depths of the mind ; but none the less upon 
it rests the whole structure of thought. It is a 
mystery, as much so, and more so even, than 
Personal Existence or Identity, than Space or 
Time. It furnishes the rational explanation 
and justification of the world's religious history. 
Its consideration is for philosophers. 

Men believed in a Deity long before they 
argued the matter out ; and they do not now 
believe because they argue it out. They accept 
of a mental necessity, which is in general not 
clearly recognized. Just as men talked before 
they understood the laws of language ; and do 
not now converse because they have studied 
grammar. Just as men walked before they 
had studied anatomy; and walk now without 
any reference to anatomy. The logical basis of 
religion is one thing, its history quite another. 

It makes no difference, then, how the relig- 
ious nature historically arose — any more than 
how Art, Science and Morals arose. It exists, 
a magnificent edifice, built upon solid rock. Its 
validity is precisely as unimpeachable as that of 
any other department of human intelligence; 
and the all-important question is not as to how 
religion developed, but as to its significance, 



TEACHINGS OF MAN'S RELIGIOUS NATURE. 93 

and how one may so obey the divine impulse in 
his breast as to honor his own higher nature and 
best fulfil his destiny. 

Nor does it at all affect the truth of this posi- 
tion, that men, left to their natural instincts, 
have in general ignored the Absolute Deity and 
bowed down to many petty divinities, and even 
to idols manufactured by their own hands. 
This was simply a faulty working of human in- 
telligence, analogous to the general feebleness 
of popular conceptions on any profound subject 
of reflection. It does not invalidate the claims 
of the religious nature ; any more than the fact 
that savages can not multiply or divide, invali- 
dates the theorems of Euclid or the Principia 
of Newton. Whenever in history the human 
mind has matured to its manhood, not only 
have mathematical and other scientific laws 
asserted themselves effectively, the religious 
nature of man has ever risen to contemplation 
of the Absolute God, and Mythology has been 
to far-seeing eyes but the transparent veil hung 
by human childishness before the Awf ul Glory 
of Deity. The Egyptians, amid their gross 
idolatry, well knew the One God and Father of 
All. In Greece and in India the Deity was the 
Background to all earnest thinking. Socrates 
argued for a creative God almost as forcibly as 
Paley. 



94 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

But after we have answered all the atheistical 
objections, there still remains the Epicurean 
cry of " Cui bono ? " " Of what benefit is the- 
ology ? What practical knowledge can we have 
of this Divine Firmament of thought, this 
majestic but indistinct Background of the Abso- 
lute ! Our very thinking of Him, conditions 
Him and degrades Him from His godhood. To 
know Him is to be ignorant of Him." But 
would not such an argument prove as well that 
the little child can not know its own father? 
We all are, indeed, only creeping babes in the- 
ology. Our loftiest conceptions of God and of 
His powers are but childish gropings. We can 
at best understand His ways only after the inat- 
tentive, feeble and puzzled way of infancy. The 
completest descriptions we can give of His attri- 
butes must fail to express His fulness. But is 
it not knowledge ? It surely is not comprehen- 
sion ; it is merest apprehension, and that of a 
babe. But it is sufficient to enable the child to 
recognize the Father. 

Natural Theology is not at all a region of 
exact knowledge, and we can not expect clear 
outlines : it is the sphere of intuition, of aspira- 
tion and of devotion. An idea of God that 
were perfectly comprehensible we could reject 
at once, as palpably false ; just as any concep- 
tion of the Universe, which left nothing to be 



TEACHINGS OF MAN'S RELIGIOUS NATURE. 95 

explained, would thereby show itself a silly lie. 
We must be content to admit, with Augustine, 
that " God is greater and truer in our thoughts 
than in our words : He is greater and truer in 
reality than in our thoughts ! " We each have 
our horizon. Men may rise in altitude and the 
horizon may ever widen ; but no mere man 
can reach limitless vision. Nor may angels, 
archangels, nor heavenly principalities. The 
highest celestial being has his horizon. God 
only beholds no limit to His view and brooks no 
restraint upon His powers. 

We claim, then, as the first teaching of the 
religions nature of man, that there is a God. 

Its second teaching is a bidding to worship. 

Here again we are pointed down to the sub- 
structure of the mind, — this time, however, to 
the foundation of the Emotional rather than of 
the Rational department of Intelligence. 

To worship God is as much an instinct, as to 
believe in God is an intuition. It is a religious 
soul-necessity. 

Not but that men may ignore it — as the ne- 
cessity is moral, — not but that they may respond 
imperfectly. It is simply a spiritual pressure 
within ; and men yield to it, in a thousand dif- 
ferent degrees and with a thousand differing 
forms, according to the depth of their natures, 
their educations and their surroundings. 



96 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

]STor does it concern us to ask how worship 
arose, nor through what brutalities it progressed ; 
ere Moses bowed at the Burning Bush, ere 
Christ enjoined upon the Samaritan Woman at 
Jacob's Well the spiritual worship of a Spiritual 
Deity, ere Paul on Mars' Hill pointed the idol- 
aters of Athens to the Unknown God, "in 
whom we live and move and have our being." 

And if any complain that it is impossible to 
decide, from the light of Nature, whom to wor- 
ship, or when or how or where, this does not 
prove darkness, but only dimness ; and it is no 
stretch of probability to surmise that whosoever 
approaches Deity according to his light, such as 
it is, will surely not fail of divine recognition, 
be the time, place or form what it may. 

If reasons are demanded, we can give many 
why the creature should recognize the Creator, 
why the finite should rest upon the Arm of the 
Infinite, why the puzzled human mind should 
commune with the Thinker of all thoughts ; but 
these arguments will each only bring us to a 
fundamental oughtness. God is because He is ; 
and He ought to be worshipped because He 
ought to be worshipped. Necessity is laid upon 
us in and by the constitution of things. We 
are made to reflect and glorify, to study, admire, 
praise, thank and obey Him. The man who 
questions it is like the child that challenges the 



TEACHINGS OF MAN'S RELIGIOUS NATURE. 97 

obligation to respect and love its father. Well 
said Epictetus : " If I were a nightingale, I 
would act the part of a nightingale, — if a swan, 
the part of a swan ; but since I am a reasonable 
creature, it is my duty to praise God." 

Again, the religious nature teaches us of a 
divine Providence, and most naturally we 
pray. This is an inevitable inference from 
what has gone on before, here and in the pre- 
ceding chapters. The Creator, Preserver and 
Aim of the Universe, — the Thinker and Law- 
giver of Nature, — the Moral Governor and Su- 
preme Court of the Soul, — thfe Deity whom we 
perforce recognize by intuition and worship by 
instinct, it is inconceivable that He should be 
improvident of us or unjust toward us, in any 
of His dealings. Many things happening that 
look to the contrary conclusion, can not shake 
this faith. The cloud that rests over the world 
does not shadow God. 

And so Socrates could say to his judges, him- 
self expecting death : " Wherefore, O judges, 
be of good cheer about death, and know this of 
a truth : that no evil can happen to a good man 
either in life or after death." And Plato fur- 
ther could urge : " Then this must be our notion 
of the just man ; that even when he is in pov- 
7 



98 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

erty or sickness or any other seeming misfortune, 
all things will in the end work together for 
good to him in life and death, for the gods 
have a eare of any one whose desire is to be just 
and to be like God, as far as man can attain His 
likeness by the pursuit of virtue." 

Ages before Christ, and probably even before 
Moses, the Deity was spoken of in Egypt, by the 
initiated, as " Father." He was described in 
such words as "Rock of Truth is thy Name"; 
" He wipes tears from off all faces "; " Every one 
glorifies thy goodness ; mild is thy love toward 
us ; thy tenderness surrounds our hearts ; great 
is thy love in all the souls of men." The hu- 
man mind, in its maturity, always has recog- 
nized the essential goodness of God. 

And appeal to that Goodness in prayer always 
has been found consistent with the highest 
philosophy. Cleanthes, Euripides, Socrates, 
Epictetus, Marcus Antoninus and many other 
sages of antiquity, all have left behind them, 
though guided only by the light of Nature, beau- 
tiful and earnest prayers. Take these, for in- 
stance : Socrates, in Phsedrus, prayed, " Grant 
me to become beautiful in the inner man, and 
that, whatever outward things I have, may be 
at peace with those within. May I deem the 
wise man rich, and may I have such a portion 
of gold as none but a prudent man can either 



TEACHINGS OF MAN'S RELIGIOUS NATURE. 99 

bear or employ." In Euripides we have the 
prayer, u Thou God of all, infuse light into the 
souls of men, whereby they may be enabled to 
know what is the root from whence all their 
evils spring, and by what means they may avoid 
them." 

Still another teaching of the religious nature 
is Immortality. Here again we have an infer- 
ence, and urged on by a mighty yearning. 

Immortality is something quite different from 
that mere love of life and shrinking from death 
which man shares with the brute. 

A belief in it appeared in very early times, 
and expressed the ambition of wise and good 
men. It became the teaching of philosophies, 
which have swayed the thinking world in all 
succeeding ages. Cicero wrote this sentence 
from amid a generation of gross sensualists and 
a coterie of literary believers in annihilation : 
" There is, I know not how, in minds, a certain 
presage of a future existence ; and this takes the 
deepest root, and is the most discoverable, in 
the greatest geniuses and most exalted souls." 
At first, this presage was matter of speculation ; 
but in time it descended from its hints in Or- 
phic hymns, its hidden teachings in Eleusinian 
mysteries, and its fine-spun academic subtleties, 
into the daily life of men. Immortality became 
a Hope ; and it was a blessed hope already, when 
Revelation made it a Certainty. 



100 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

Many arguments to prove the Immortality of 
the Soul have been ventured by spiritual minds ; 
but they have served, like syllogistic arguments 
for the being and the worship of a God, to bring 
out the spiritual necessities of religious thought 
and experience rather than to prove an incon- 
testable conclusion. 

It may be profitable briefly to review some 
of these. Thus, a future life is needed to ex- 
plain this. It seems irrational, that the mind 
should be challenged to the study of life and of 
death, of time and of eternity, of the Universe 
and of God, only to be mocked by its incapacity. 
There is a sharp incongruity in the creation of 
an intelligence made only for failure. It is in- 
tolerable to think, that the problems that have 
puzzled us, here below, are not for us to be 
solved, somewhere and at some time. 

But not only thought is interrupted by death, 
virtue is left unfinished. Man is capable of 
most wonderful expansion of moral powers. 
He grows in grace, yet ever the law of virtue 
remains for him an ideal. His whole being fills 
with a desire to attain ; yet ever he fails of per- 
fection. Death sharply interrupts the process. 
Yet the imagination prolongs it, can not but 
prolong it, into another existence. It seems 
extremely improbable, that what was the high- 
est aim of life below, should be miserably 



TEACHINGS OF MAN'S RELIGIOUS NATURE, \§\ 

balked, and by the wise and upright Judge, just 
short of attainment. Unless human life be aim- 
less, and human virtue a mere shadow and 
vanity of vanities, all vanity ! this earthly walk 
is a sojourn, and Home Beyond. 

Moreover, the sense of justice, fully treated 
in the preceding chapter, demands a future ex- 
istence for reward and punishment. To aver 
that the wicked suffer and that the good prosper, 
according to their several merits, is to assert 
what manifestly fails to take place. The moral 
government of this world, as regards individ- 
uals, is as unfinished and unsatisfactory as 
human philosophy or human virtue. And, 
moreover, after the fullest vindication of human 
law, the moral sense, as regards any criminal, 
still remains disturbed. There ought to be a 
future to right wrongs, to punish guilt and to 
reward virtue. 

These arguments not only carry such convic- 
tion as may be in them ; they surely reveal a 
deep-seated tendency in human nature to look 
Beyond ; and they explain that mighty yearning 
for eternal life, which had already taken a deep 
hold of many religious natures when Jesus came 
to bring life and immortality to light, through 
the Gospel. 



CHAPTER YIII. 

GOD IN HISTO ET. 

"Behind the suns, rest suns in the farthest sky. Their 
distant ray, these thousands of years, has been flying toward 
the tiny earth and has reached it not. 

" O Thou tender, near God ! Scarcely does the human spirit 
open its little babe's eye, ere Thou beamest in upon it, O Sun 
of the suns and of spirits / " — Richter. 

Voices from Beyond are clearly heard in 
human history. As in certain very interesting 
laws that suggest, with irresistible persuasive- 
ness, a Divine Presence in human affairs, and 
that find no explanation on any atheistic or 
agnostic hypothesis. To these attention is 
called. 

And first, to the great pictorial law of Retrib- 
utive Justice. There works in history a ma- 
jestic system of moral compensations that quite 
lie beyond the sphere of personal guilt and in- 
nocence. History is eminently a moral drama 
and a kind of poetic justice, treating nations, 
races and communities as though they were re- 
sponsible individuals, and ages as though only a 
lifetime, deals out general reward and punish- 
(102) 



GOD IN HISTORY. 1Q3 

ment. The sins and the virtues of the fathers 
are visited upon the children. The process may 
be a long one, but it is effective. An inevitable 
succession of moral cause and effect in history, 
runs parallel to the inevitable sequence of 
natural cause and effect in the physical world. 
The Greeks had a proverb which expressed 
sense of this justice of Destiny : " The mills of 
the gods grind slow, but they grind fine." The 
themes of the famous Greek drama derived in- 
terest largely from this firm belief in a divine 
Nemesis. All history owes to this somewhat of 
its fascination. 

With extreme cases of pictorial retribution 
all are familiar. Marius at Carthage, Caesar at 
the statue of Pompey, Napoleon at St. Helena, 
and a thousand similar vivid pictures, point a 
moral not only on the fickleness of fortune, but 
still more on the irony of justice. Every one 
from childhood has heard of empires weighed 
in the balance and found wanting, doomed to 
overthrow, and long since become but a mem- 
ory. In all the great historic centers of ancient 
times are ruins of silent cities, grim tokens not 
only of the mortality of man, but as well of the 
frailty of civilizations. As the traveller stands 
on the pyramid or paces the deserted thorough- 
fares of the disentombed city, he is reminded 
not only of the genius and energy which erected 



IQ4: THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

these monuments, and of the beauty, wealth 
and wit that once adorned these habitations, 
but not less of the completeness of the over- 
throw. He is tempted to sigh with the Hebrew 
prophet, in contemplation of the overthrow of 
Babylon, " How hast thou fallen, O day-star, 
son of the morning ? " He reflects upon the 
degeneracy which provoked the ruin. The les- 
son finds utterance in few words, — great gifts 
misused, morality defied, justice forgotten, and 
therefore disaster creeping in, and final and 
utter collapse. 

Indeed, the law of retribution is fully ex- 
posited only in the history of a great nation. 
Men, as individuals, die, so soon as their native 
stock of vitality is exhausted, regardless of their 
virtues; and they may perish while yet they 
prosper in their sins. But communities and 
races and nations live on and on ; and moral 
causes, in these cases, have time to bring about 
appropriate effects. 

There is no reason why nations should die a 
natural death. National death is always un- 
natural. So far from its being true that nations 
die out of themselves in time, as some claim, it 
is rather undeniable that there is in mankind a 
recuperative energy. As the Hebrews were 
wont to put it : the sins of the fathers are visited 
upon the children to the third and fourth gener- 



GOD IN HISTORY. JQ5 

ations, but their virtues descend unto thousands 
of generations. In other words, the evil tend- 
encies of human nature are of themselves short- 
lived and prone to work out, while the good 
energies of mankind indefinitely persist and 
multiply. Races ought thus, though getting 
their deserts in sorrow and disaster by the way, 
on the whole, to rise in power and to increase 
in vigor; while the individual grows old and 
dies, the race ought to be immortal, and renew 
its youth from age to age. 

Where a race decays, where a national life 
collapses, there must have been unusual squan- 
dering of advantages and gross betrayal of 
trusts. 

But the forgotten mounds and the silent cities 
emphasize only extreme instances of the work- 
ing of the law. It is powerful and active with 
all races however progressive, and all ages 
however free from decay. u The fathers eat 
sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on 
edge ": one generation sins, and the next suffers. 
Cromwell slaughtered Irishmen, seized their 
lands, and imposed unjust laws; and all gener- 
ations of Englishmen since have been disturbed 
by the furious hatred of their victims, and will 
be forever until the wrong is righted and the 
expiation wrought out. 

Our American ancestors imported negroes to 



IQQ TUB OUTERMOST RIM, 

work on the Southern plantations, and we of 
to-day must endure and, with blood and tears, 
abate the evils of slavery. This law of retribu- 
tion gives sublimity to history, and largely fur- 
nishes the fascination of historic research. 

But it will be urged that this is not strictly 
retribution. It would not be just to punish 
one generation for what another has done. It 
is poetic justice. It is only pictorial retribu- 
tion. It is a sublime picture-lesson, illustrating 
the logic of personal desert. In the history of 
a community or nation we see fully portrayed 
that moral persistency of cause and effect which, 
in the individual life, is rudely cut asunder by 
death. 

Peoples sin and suffer, and perhaps perish ; 
and men are warned against that degeneracy 
which shall, in every vicious life, inevitably 
provoke punishment and result in ruin. 

But whose parable is this pictorial illumina- 
tion of human history in the interest of morals 
and of religion ? Is it not the Yoice of God 
using events for words? Is it not God in 
history ? 

A second indication of God in history may 
be had in the law of sacrifice. This is what 
furnishes the heroic element in human affairs. 
Men are not only animals to fight and hate and 



GOD IN HISTORY. 1Q7 

struggle for existence, an inner spiritual possi- 
bility renders them a little lower than the 
angels. Men are capable of self-denial. As 
animals in Nature, they may, and must, struggle 
to earn daily bread in competition with one an- 
other ; but as intelligent beings in history they 
are bound to humanity and charity. Herein 
we are distinguished from the merely physical 
world ; and yet it ought to be remarked, in 
passing, that at least a foreshadowing of the 
law of sacrifice is found in the physical world. 
There is an involuntary sacrifice to which all 
things are subject. Every animate or inanimate 
object has an end beyond itself, for the attain- 
ment of which it is liable at any time to be 
offered up. If plants are to grow, the soil must 
yield its richest juices and minerals: if animals 
are to survive, many plants must surrender 
foliage and fruit : if man is to prosper, cattle 
must labor, suffer and be slaughtered. If truths 
are to prevail, if reforms are to be carried out, 
if government is to be maintained or society 
preserved, many men and women must involun- 
tarily lose happiness, limbs, and it may be life, 
that their "dead selves 55 may become "step- 
ping-stones to higher things. 55 Every means 
looks toward an end, and every end, sooner or 
later, to greater or less degree, must yield its 
own objective importance for the furtherance of 
ends still beyond. 



108 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

Look at these delicate seedlings that press up 
into the May sunshine. They are called an- 
nuals; but pluck the blossom in the bud and 
they will live two seasons. The work of per- 
fecting seed shortens their career. Leave them 
to themselves and they will blossom and die. 
They die that their offspring may live. 

The lioness will protect her whelp till she 
lies stretched at its side in willing death. The 
pelican will give her blood to the thirsting 
chicks. Darwin tells of an ape, that rescued a 
wounded comrade from within the range of a 
dozen flashing rifles, to carry his brother brute 
dauntlessly up the mountain-side. Warrior ants 
will fight for their community with a desperate 
devotion of limb and life, which the fiercest 
human fanatic or the most thoroughly seasoned 
human veteran never attains. Many a man's 
life has been saved by a dog or a horse, at cost 
of self-destruction. 

It will be noticed that all this is involuntary 
and pictorial. The law of Sacrifice in Nature, 
like the law of Retribution in History, is a 
poetic foreshadowing of sublimities of character 
and great concerns of destiny. It is Nature's 
prophecy of virtue, which she utters in the lower 
to realize in the higher world. 

The voluntary and noble sacrifice observable 
in history commences in childhood ; and as life 



GOD IN HISTORY. 1Q9 

advances, ever more emphatically does it be- 
come, for every human being, the obligation, 
and, indeed, the gauge of virtue. A father's 
or a mother's love, what endless self-denials 
does it necessitate ! The family is preserved 
and the home made happy only by the volun- 
tary unselfishness of all its inmates. In civil 
relations, how much property, time and often 
blood, in taxes and in service, must be devoted, 
in order to insure the public weal. During our 
late civil war, the North alone gave to death 
300,000 of her bravest youth and expended four 
billions of her wealth, for the integrity of the 
Union. 

Consider an event like the following ; and it 
stands not alone in the story of human strifes. 

At a now long-since-forgotten battle of the 
Middle Ages (of St. Jacob, in 1600), a body of 
Swiss mountaineers, amid their own hills, fought 
a far superior army, composed of the elite of 
French chivalry. The contest was utterly un- 
equal. The French knights and men-at-arms 
were clad in superior armor, warriors from their 
youth and trained to military manoeuvres and 
achievement; while the Swiss peasants had 
only rude weapons, scanty armor and no dis- 
cipline. But to submit was shameful. To save 
their liberties they must conquer. So they bat- 
tled with quenchless ardor and sublime courage ; 



HO THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

and death seemed as nothing at all, compared 
with slavery. Not one fled ; and there they 
died, falling like the Spartans of old at Ther- 
mopylae, — died to a man, amid heaps of smitten 
foes. 

Or take a still more striking instance of un- 
selfish heroism, more striking because deliberate 
and in no wise influenced by the mere momen- 
tary battle-glow of physical courage. 

A race of men, who for ages had battled with 
the sea, shutting out the ocean from its salt 
meadows to replace waves with orchards, gar- 
dens, factories and cities, were striving, in dire 
earnestness, to force back such a tide of tyranny 
and bloodthirsty cruelty as seldom has threat- 
ened to engulf any civilization. William the 
Silent, Prince of Orange 3 the unchallenged peer 
of Washington, had been assassinated by a 
Spanish emissary, and Maurice, his son, des- 
tined to become the greatest general and states- 
man of his age, was hardly more than a youth ; 
but the persistency of the heroic Dutch was 
beginning to tell upon the resources of their 
oppressors. The ships of the States were be- 
ginning to sweep the seas of Spanish treasure ; 
and their soldiers were becoming apt to war 
and a fair match for the terrible Spanish in- 
fantry. 

It was Saturday evening, in an ancient town 



GOD IN HISTORY. \\\ 

on a canal, a fortified place, garrisoned by the 
mercenaries of Spain. The winter had been 
long and cold, and fuel was become scarce. A 
boat, loaded with turf, had just come through 
the water-gate. Some Italian hirelings had 
hurried on board to get the needed supplies, 
and then had dragged the vessel near the guard- 
house. A crowd of soldiers tramped over the 
deck, and an officer lounged for a while in the 
cabin. A servant of some high official com- 
plained of the turf, " his master would never be 
satisfied with its inferior quality." " Oh ! " re- 
marked the skipper, "the best part of the cargo 
is underneath, kept expressly for the Captain : 
he will be sure to get enough of it to-morrow." 

But hark! what was that? — -a cough? — a 
sneeze? down in the hold? Every one would have 
said so, had not the pumps made such a racket. 
A leak, it seems, had been sprung in coming u p 
the canal ; and the skipper and his brother were 
working the pumps as if cargo and life depend- 
ed upon it ; and in their excitement were bawl- 
ing to one another the simplest directions in 
voice of thunder. If a hundred men had 
sneezed down below, no one could have detect- 
ed them in such uproar. Surely never were 
noisier seamen on a Dutch canal. 

And now night is come, darkness is fallen, 
the crowd is gone, the guard are asleep, the city 



112 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

in repose, the skipper and his brother alone. 
See them creep into the little cabin and anx- 
iously open a trap-door in the floor and peer 
into the cold, damp gloom of the hold. " Come 
forth, good fellows, the way is clear!" What 
are these ? — seventy armed men, packed together 
like sardines, up to their knees in icy-cold 
water, cramped with the chill, nigh suffocated 
of foul air and faint with hunger and thirst. 
From Monday until Saturday night, with only 
one brief release, they have thus sat, while the 
boat has encountered contrary winds and blocks 
of ice. Surely one might say, u Patients for 
the hospital. 55 But no, rather heroes girded 
up for battle and for victory, they shall warm 
themselves with deadly blows and quench their 
thirst in red blood. Yonder lieutenant, while 
the soldiers of Spain were tramping the deck, 
overcome of cold and dampness, began to sneeze. 
Drawing his dagger, he besought his next com- 
rade to stab him to the heart lest he betray them 
to their foe. That man 5 s name was Held, 
which being interpreted means "hero" ! 

It is scarce necessary to pause upon the 
sequel. Seventy such heroes, armed and in the 
streets of a small sleeping city, would find it 
easy to slaughter the guard, to open the gates 
and to let Prince Maurice in. Thus began a 
series of victories that ended in the destruction 



GOD IN HISTORY. \\§ 

of Spanish prestige, the establishment of na- 
tional independence and a consequent commer- 
cial prosperity, up to that time unsurpassed in 
the world's history. 

Those seventy heroes were rough soldiers, 
very likely rendered bloodthirsty by years of 
conflict with a foe that knew no mercy. It is 
doubtful whether they went to church very 
often, prayed much or gave alms to the poor. 
They drank enormous quantities of beer and 
worse liquors, were profane and in many cases 
licentious. Yet all hardships they suffered for 
liberty : all perils they ventured for the deliv- 
erance of their country. They freely offered 
themselves as sacrifices for the State. They 
stood between their homes and a licentious 
foreign soldiery, between their churches and 
the Inquisition, between their council-halls and 
a foreign tyranny. 

But why should they have done so, and why 
do we praise them for thus ignoring their per- 
sonal risk and acting in heroic self-denial ? 

And this is only one incident, in history, of sub- 
lime heroism : they are numberless. Indeed, the 
narrative would have had no right to a place in 
this work had it not been typical. The story 
is a parable. It reveals a law. History details 
a thousand such and with the same lesson. But 
notice how seemingly unreasonable this law is, 
8 



114 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

at least from the natural stand-point. It cer- 
tainly appears, on the face of it, irrational and 
much more unfair, that one man must suffer in 
behalf of another, as the cost of virtue. Yet 
all the world applauds this self-devotion. We 
shake our heads over it in perplexity ; but our 
hearts leap for joy, and our proudest claim for 
man is that he is capable of this heroic self- 
forgetfulness. 

So all-compelling is this law of sacrifice that 
it finds its way into religions, and becomes in- 
evitably a part of every scheme of worship. It 
may be an offering of first-fruits or a shedding 
of the blood of rams or of bullocks. It may be 
a sacrifice of the fairest of the captives. It may 
be a sprinkling of human blood upon an idol. 
A father burns his dearest child on the brazen 
knees of Moloch, or a mother throws her babe 
into the Ganges to crocodiles. The devotee 
perhaps submits his own members to torture, 
and swings on an iron hook or lies down on a 
bed of spikes or lives year by year tormented 
by sackcloth and flagellations and fastings and 
vigils. 

Dr. Rein, in his recent work of " Travels in 
Japan," recounts a popular legend, significant 
of the beliefs of the common people, a sad 
legend of a gentle wife, who, knowing her hus- 



GOD IN HISTOR Y. 1 15 

band's ship to be out upon the deep in a wild 
storm, herself sprang into the raging sea to pro- 
pitiate the angry gods, and so secure, at ex- 
pense of her own faithful life, the safety of her 
beloved. 

At times worship has assumed the form of a 
stately ritual of horrors : priests have been 
made murderers by profession, and the taking 
of life considered the most acceptable homage 
of the religious nature to Deity. The Aztec 
civilization of Mexico yearly sacrificed thou- 
sands of victims. On one red year over one 
hundred thousand wretches died in honor of 
the gods. Multitudes stood breathless and 
adoring about the pyramid temples, as the cap- 
tives were taken to the summit, and there, in 
view of all, were slain, the chief priest tearing 
out the still quivering heart to hold it up an 
offering to the Sun. 

One of the customs of the Aztecs was very 
remarkable. A beautiful captive was annually 
sacrificed to Tezcatlipoca. For a whole year he 
was treated and worshipped as a god. He was 
attended by pages and thronged by a prostrating 
multitude, whithersoever he was led. On the 
fatal day a solemn procession followed him to 
the temple, and there he was offered up as an 
impersonation of a good divinity, with elabo- 
rately respectful and devout ceremonies. 



HQ THE O U TERM O ST RIM. 

But what can be more manifest than the 
logical absurdity of this rite of sacrifice ? The 
fruits and flowers are clearly of no use to Deity; 
and the shedding of blood is brutal, even when 
only animals are the victims. How can Deity 
be pleased with waste ? how much less with 
murder ? Do we not, in all this groping of the 
natural man, but discern the human mind, led 
by a divine instinct, approaching blindly the 
great truth that the highest act of worship is 
self-sacrifice, and the noblest form of virtue un- 
selfishness ? 

Indeed sacrifice, whether as a law of conduct 
or as a rite, is an instinct perplexed, that gropes 
toward the light through a dismal labyrinth of 
errors. It tends to urge mankind up toward 
the Golden Rule of virtue. As Justice in his- 
tory is pictorial of that Divine Judgment Bar 
before which the soul, in its guilt or in its inno- 
cence, is arraigned : so Sacrifice is pictorial of 
that perfect virtue which fulfils law. And if 
we call the Vengeance that overtakes vice and 
crime, in the course of history, Pictorial Retri- 
bution, we must as well name Sacrifice, Picto- 
rial Virtue. 

But Whose picture ? and why in the interest 
of Morals and Religion? Is it not again the 
Voice of God, using facts for words? Is it not 
God in History ? 



GOD IN HISTORY. \\f 

Once more, — the presence of God in human 
events is indicated by the law of sorrow. And 
this is what gives pathos to history. There is 
an enlightening and purifying mission of adver- 
sity. Trouble, borne in the right spirit, opens 
the eyes and improves the character. As Alfred 
de Musset, speaking out of bitter experience, 
has told us, "No one knows himself, until he 
has suffered." The merchant succeeds often 
because once he failed. The philosopher suffers 
nothing from a rebuff to his conceit. The 
author does better by the world, that his first 
book in vain sought a publisher. The king, de- 
throned and exiled, is often a far nobler man 
than the monarch glittering in his crown and 
sceptre amid flatterers. 

It can not be said that this law of sorrow dis- 
poses of the awful problem of evil in the world ; 
and still less may it be denied that pains anger 
and harden rebellious natures. But it remains 
true, after all that has been said by the cynic, 
that there is a use in dark things, and that 
grief may be allowed by the willing disposi- 
tion to mellow and sweeten and beautify the 
soul. Diderot declared, " Prosperity unmasks 
the vices: adversity reveals the virtues." 
He might have also averred, — for it is true, — 
that prosperity provokes the vices and that ad- 
versity begets the virtues. The world is the 



11$ THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

better that a shadow rests upon it. Dr. Bush- 
nell, after the death of his only child, said : " I 
have learned more of experimental religion 
since my little boy died than in all my life be- 
fore." As an English poet has lately sung : 

" Were there no night, we could not read the stars, 
The heavens would turn into a blinding glare : 
Freedom is best seen through the prison bars, 
And rough seas make the haven passing fair. 

"We can not measure joys but by their loss : 
When blessings fade away we see them then : 
Our richest clusters grow around the Cross ; 
And in the night-time angels sing to men. 

" The seed must first lie buried deep in earth, 
Before the lily opens to the sky ; 
So 'light is sown,' and gladness has its birth, 
In the dark deeps where we can only cry. 

"Life out of death, is Heaven's unwritten law, 
Nay, it is written in a myriad forms ; 
The victor's palm grows on the field of war, 

And strength and beauty are the fruit of storms.'* 

But consider what this means. Is it not also, 
like the laws of Retribution and of Sacrifice, a 
pressure toward development of character and 
in the interest of the largest concerns of human 
destiny ? If through humbling at God's hand 
man is exalted, not only is sorrow justified and 



GOD IN HIS TOR Y. \ \ 9 

explained : shall not also humility appear as the 
fitting attitude of the soul before the Almighty ? 
Nay, if the law of Justice in history be Pictorial 
Retribution and the law of Sacrifice Pictorial 
Yirtue, then is this law of Sorrow Pictorial 
JETumility. 

But Whose picture ? and why in the interests 
of Morals and Religion ? Is it not, still again, 
the Voice of God using experiences the tender- 
est and deepest for words, words of O so great 
import ? Is it not God in History ? 

Well sang a gentle nature, upon whom grief 
had wrought a lovely work of grace : 

u There is no God, the foolish saith, 

But none, there is no sorrow ; 
And Nature oft the cry of faith 

In bitter need will borrow. 
Eyes, which the preacher could not school, 

By wayside graves are raised ; 
And lips say, 4 God be pitiful ! ' 

That ne'er said, i God be praised ! ' " 

Attention has now been directed to three 
great laws that ever work in history, and which 
no agnostic nor atheistic hypothesis can at all 
account for nor in any wise explain, — the laws 
of Justice or Pictorial Retribution, of Sacrifice 
or Pictorial Yirtue and of Sorrow or Pictorial 
Humility. These three great principles lend 
to the story of human events its fascination. 



120 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

They lift history above the pettiness of men's 
foibles, and render it tragic, heroic and pa- 
thetic. But they do much more. They are 
each voices of God, uttering in events, in facts 
and in experiences, parables of God's attitude 
toward men and of what ought to be man's 
attitude toward God. 



PART III. 
THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS. 



CHAPTER IX. 

INSPIRED GENIUS. 

.... " Heaven-taught lyre 
None but the noblest passions to inspire." 

— Lyttleton. 

We have now proceeded far enough in our 
meditations upon the mysteries of life to find 
ourselves perforce querying : whether human 
genius ever becomes so far supernatural as to 
recognize by a divine insight, and declare by an 
authoritative revelation, truths from Beyond, 
unperceived of the ordinary eye and unprovided 
for in the common organization of human in- 
telligence. 

Is Nature our only guide in morals and re- 
ligion, and her Dimness our only light ? Have 
we but hints, intuitions, instincts and infer- 
ences ? 

Surely there is no inherent improbability in 

(121) 



122 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

the rise, from time to time, of men gifted with 
inspired genius. One might naturally expect 
history to produce occasionally luminous souls 
that should enlighten the comparative darkness 
of Nature. It is quite rational to surmise the 
existence of some provision for the religious 
growth of mankind. 

This never has seemed improbable to any 
race or class of men. 

Prophecy founds itself substantially upon 
human needs. It is hard to worship a Being 
who remains eternally silent ; and in no way 
can the Divine Thinker and Lawgiver commu- 
nicate with His creatures more directly or effect- 
ively than by the illumination of some mediat- 
ing mind. Hence the idea of inspiration of 
some sort comes naturally and with show of 
reason to all religious natures, in all ages and in 
every clime. If real illumination fail, clair- 
voyance or fraud must take its place. The 
prophet, let him be called nabi, vates, mantis, 
druid, dervish or medicine-man, will ever be 
found speaking authoritatively on divine things. 

This need, and its universal recognition, are 
of profound significance to the thoughtful. 
The reverent student of religions will not de- 
spise these many jarring voices, but rather will 
seek patiently to learn of what Substance these 
insubstantialities are the shadows. Doubtless 



INSPIRED GENIUS. 123 

these superstitions are mirage ; but let us re- 
member that mirage is, after all, the unusual 
refraction of a real, far-away landscape. 

We have found that in human history all the 
higher laws of knowledge, taste and emotion 
work progressively. The beginnings of the 
various arts and sciences have ever been rude ; 
but they foreshadowed coming sublimities of 
the Beautiful and the True. In like manner 
the law of prophecy ought to elucidate and 
justify itself. History may reasonably be ex- 
pected, in some of its chapters, to give us a 
genuine inspiration authoritative and convinc- 
ing, as she has given us science and art in 
glorious maturity. 

Nor has there been any failure in this regard. 
Prophecy has as truly risen above its small be- 
ginnings as any art or science, and as veritably 
become a channel for human genius as painting, 
sculpture, mathematics or chemistry. 

It will be the purpose of this chapter to fix 
the reader's attention upon the most remarkable 
series of phenomena, of the sort we are contem- 
plating, the world has as yet produced — an out- 
burst of religions feeling perfectly unique, com- 
plete in itself, and not less than sublime. 

It is evident that we may wisely and fairly 
ignore all feebler manifestations. For if there 
be a higher supernatural law guaranteeing the 



124 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

possibility of a divine inspiration of certain 
prophetic natures, we may be sure it will best 
verify and explain itself in its most luminous 
workings. We do not go to savages to learn 
the largest forthcome of the moral nature, but 
to philanthropists like Gautama, Confucius and 
Christ. We do not ask of the brutal and super- 
stitious instruction in natural theology : we sit 
down rather at the feet of men of religious in- 
sight, like Moses, Pythagoras and Christ. All 
arts and all sciences have their masters, in whom 
the law of their craft is potent, and whose 
voices only are authoritative. The study of the 
wild and fitful workings of the prophetic fervor 
in savage, barbarous and idolatrous races serves 
simply as encouragement for us to seek, with 
hopeful heart, that grandest outburst of re- 
ligious feeling history records — Hebrew Proph- 
ecy. A candid study of the facts involved in 
the story of the Hebrew prophets will fall little 
short of converting a general sense of the need 
and probability of divine inspiration into an as- 
surance. 

Here were a class of men, and their history 
extending over many centuries, of intense indi- 
viduality, who yet believed themselves to be 
under the sway of the Divine Spirit. Simple- 
hearted, unselfish, conscientious, devoted, they 
spoke for God. Imposture, in most cases at 



INSPIRED GENIUS, \ 25 

least, was wholly out of the question. They 
were, as a class, able, honorable and in earnest 
unto death. 

The Greek word npocprfrip gives the best 
idea of the work they claimed to do. The 
preposition in this noun indicates not prece- 
dence, but mediation. The prophet spake for 
God. This is the strictly classical usage of the 
term. Apollo is called by^Eschylus the 7tpoq)?]trjo 
of Zeus, the Pithia by Herodotus the 7tpoq)rJTiZ 
of Apollo. And the term is very properly em- 
ployed in the New Testament to express the 
simple hortatory utterance of truth, a meaning 
which, in English, the word prophecy has only 
recently lost. That the Greek term was well 
chosen by the Seventy to translate the Hebrew 
name " nabi," is apparent from a few words in 
Exodus. "The Lord said unto Moses, 'I have 
made thee a God to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy 
brother shall be thy nabi ' "; which explains it- 
self fully in a preceding paragraph : " 1 he shall 
be thy spokesman unto the people : and he 
shall be, even he shall be to thee instead of a 
mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of 
God.' " The Hebrew nabi was the divine 
mouthpiece. The utterance of the Divine 
Counsel, by word and by symbol, was his ap- 
propriate sphere of action. 

And this was never forgotten. The Hebrew 



126 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

prophets were the guardians of literature : music 
and song formed part of their collegiate educa- 
tion, and the writings of many of them give 
evidence of careful training in composition and 
rhetoric ; but they never lost view of the fact 
that they were only Yoices. Personality in 
authorship and notions of copyright were en- 
tirely foreign to their habits of thought. What 
they spake was the u Word of the Lord "; and 
it belonged to the people of God. 

They were annalists, and the greater portion 
of the historical parts of the Old Testament 
came from their reeds, and much that they 
wrote is lost ; but their spirit was neither scien- 
tific nor literary, and their object was mainly 
to illuminate and apply to history their the- 
ology and ethics. 

At times they forecast the future. Elijah 
foretold the famine. Jeremiah prophesied the 
death of Hananiah. Isaiah accurately described 
beforehand the downfall of Babylon and Tyre. 
But even this was incidental. The prophets 
were not chiefly diviners; and there could be 
no greater mistake than to suppose that this 
gift of prediction ever degenerated into mere 
fortune-telling. 

The prophet's foreknowledge, like his music, 
his poetry and his history, was but a kind of 
voice to utter the Word of the Lord. 



INSPIRED GENIUS. \<%J 

Pre-eminently, and almost to the exclusion of 
every other thought, the Hebrew prophets were 
the religious teachers of the nation. And in 
this office they spoke with authority. As Micah 
declared of himself, and indeed for all his 
class, when he denounced certain false prophets 
who aspired to the position of public instructor 
without the guarantee of a divine illumination : 
" But truly I am full of power, by the Spirit of 
the Lord and of judgment and of might, to de- 
clare unto Jacob his transgression and unto 
Israel his sin." Power, judgment and might 
by the Spirit, to declare and to rebuke, this was 
essentially the prophetic gift. 

We have no evidence, however, that they 
ever scattered over the land to proclaim and ex- 
pound, as do modern Christian pastors. Some- 
times singly, sometimes in masses, they spoke, 
when the Spirit moved, and to such congrega- 
tions as were at hand and would listen. Though 
often concerning themselves with personal 
wrongs or merely local evils, they were wont 
to appeal in general, not so much to the indi- 
vidual as to the national conscience. Most of 
the prophecies that have come down to us, bear 
directly upon the national life. They are ap- 
plications of the prophetic theology and ethics, 
uttered with authority, to current political 
events. Neither prophet, priest nor king were 



128 THE ° UTERMOST RIM. 

spared. Did David sin, Nathan was ready with 
his parable of the ewe lamb, and his searching 
" Thou art the man ! " Did Solomon exchange 
his wisdom for folly, and burden his king- 
dom with profligacy and extravagance, Abijah 
clothed himself in a new garment and meeting 
the ambitious Jeroboam in a field alone, rent 
his robe into twelve pieces : " Take thee ten 
pieces, for thus saith the Lord the God of Is- 
rael, ' Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of 
the hand of Solomon and will give ten tribes to 
thee.' " And Jeroboam, when his day of pros- 
perity came, no sooner reared his golden calf, 
than lo ! there went forth from Judah a prophet 
to cry against his altar, and to defy him to his 
face. 

That the vast political power involved in 
such an office was used moderately and wisely, 
and seldom if ever abused, furnishes extraor- 
dinary evidence of the fidelity of these simple 
and sublime characters to the fundamental idea 
of prophecy as it has just been defined. The 
weight of the Seers' influence, whenever the 
balance in Jewish history trembled, invariably 
fell upon the scale of sound theology, spiritual 
worship and pure morality. 

The theology of the prophets was very sim- 
ple. They held to the Unity and Spirituality 
of God ; to His Providence, His Justice and 



INSPIRED GENIUS. 129 

His Compassion. Surrounded by idolaters 
among the national enemies, and by perverts 
to heathenism among the Chosen People, they 
never failed to discern clearly all that Nature 
at her best can tell us of Deity ; and to this 
they added a most emphatic and authoritative 
declaration of the Divine Mercy. Probably no 
men however gifted, before or since, have had 
clearer intuition of the moral and religious order 
of the Universe. 

When the truth of their utterances was ques- 
tioned, or the authoritative tone of its declara- 
tion was challenged, they simply appealed to 
that mysterious something within them which 
compelled to speech. They were " men of the 
Spirit," and had no option in the matter. It 
was Jehovah's breath (ruah) in them which 
uttered the fatal words. 

Hence Hebrews never became prophets from 
mere choice, as youths now enter the ministry. 
They were called. There was a vision, as of 
the Throne in the Temple to Isaiah ; or a voice, 
as with the child Samuel; or at least an intense 
conviction. The call of the Lord now rang in 
the ear of the designated one, day and night. 
If with Moses, he said, " O Lord ! I am not 
eloquent, I am slow of speech and of a slow 
tongue," the Lord seemed to answer, "I will be 
with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou 
9 



130 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

shalt say." If he moaned with Jeremiah, " O 
Lord God, behold I can not speak, for I am a 
child"; the Lord would seem to stretch forth 
hands to touch his mouth, — "Behold, I have 
put my words in thy mouth!" And if after- 
ward, amid perils and heartsick, he shrank back, 
saying with the tearful prophet, "I will not 
make mention of Him, nor speak any more in 
His name"; then God's Word was in his heart 
"as a fire shut up in his bones," and he was 
"weary with forbearing and could not stay." 
This intense conviction of a divine call came at 
times upon men who had not received the 
slightest education ; as in the case of Amos, 
who was a poor shepherd of Tekoah. 

In some cases, the divine afflatus was a con- 
stant energy, as with Elijah, Isaiah and Jere- 
miah ; and the prophet was ready to speak the 
Word of the Lord on all occasions. In other 
cases it w^as infrequent, or at least variable in 
intensity, as when the aged Miriam broke forth 
into her song of triumph on the shores of the 
Red Sea, or Deborah rejoiced over the fall of 
Sisera, or Hannah praised God for a great 
mercy. Sometimes, even with the greatest 
Seers, for extraordinary efforts, the Spirit must 
needs be courted and the divine phrensy aroused 
by strains of music, as with Elisha at the battle 
in the desert. 






INSPIRED GENIUS. 131 

The illumination of the Hebrew prophets was 
pictorial and ecstatic, and thus in harmony with 
prevailing habits of thought. At times the 
Word of the Lord came in a dream, or again it 
came during trance in a vision. Hence the use 
of the term Seer. Indeed so wonted was this 
aspect of their work, that the idea of vision at- 
tached itself to the simplest declarative utter- 
ances. It is evident that even their general 
apprehension of religious things was conceived 
of as a supernatural insight. But even when 
their words were mere exhortation, their man- 
ner of speech was impassioned, and sometimes 
almost phrensied. This is perhaps hinted at 
in the term nabi, which comes from a root 
meaning " bubbling " or " boiling." The Spirit 
of Jehovah so filled the prophet, that in its 
irrepressible vivacity it effervesced. This effer- 
vescence was at times so lively that there resulted 
only involuntary and unintelligible phrensy. 

Yet notwithstanding the overmastering nat- 
ure of the divine afflation, the individuality of 
the prophet was never obscured for a moment. 
No personalities in history are more intense 
than those of Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah. 
These were men of genius, chosen because they 
were such. Their characters were stamped 
upon their words and works. The hopeful 
and sublime strains of Isaiah are as different 



132 THE OUTERMOST RIM, 

from the plaintive notes of Jeremiah, as the 
stately imagery of "Paradise Lost" from the 
tearful tenderness of "In Memoriam." The 
Hebrew prophets were, in general, men of real 
and often very great ability, swayed by a power 
from above, of which they were perfectly con- 
scious, but which they neither could long resist 
nor fully explain. 

And no one will deny that such characters as 
Moses, Samuel, David, Elijah and Isaiah are 
among the most majestic figures in human his- 
tory. 

Only a small portion of the sayings of these 
remarkable men has come down to us; but 
enough survives to awaken the keenest interest 
in their lives, the gravest patience in listening 
to their claims and the liveliest admiration for 
their heroism in deed and eloquence in word. 
Whatever is rich, tender and grand in our Old 
Testament has come from them, whether in 
narrative or appeal. So far as grace and vigor 
of style are concerned, the most captious criti- 
cism of to-day finds little to condemn and much 
to praise. Bossuet was drawn to the Bible, to 
religion and to the pulpit by a glance at an 
opened chapter of Isaiah : Edmund Burke 
therein also refreshed his own splendid imagi- 
nation. In all modern times genius, studying 
the Hebrew prophets, has found itself face to 



INSPIRED GENIUS. 133 

face with something nobler even than genius, — 
a genius inspired. 

And the conclusion is pressing, that either 
these men were the victims of a gigantic illu- 
sion — an illusion that successive ages only in- 
tensified — or that the j rightfully spoke with an 
authority which no mere genius can claim. The 
patient, reverent and spiritual inquirer, however 
rationalizing his tendencies may be, will not 
long hesitate in decision. If Hebrew prophecy 
were an illusion, history surely records no folly 
so beneficent, so felicitous, so sublime. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE UNEXPECTED CHRIST. 

" blessed Well of Love, O Flowre of Grace ! 
glorious Morning Star I Lampe of Light I 
Most lively Image of thy Father s Face ! 
Eternal King of Glorie ! Lord of Ligh I ! 
Meek Lambe of God, before all worlds behight, 
How can we thee requite for all this good! 
Or what can prize, that thy most precious blood ? y * 

— Edmund Spenser. 

The inspired genius of the Hebrew Seers had 
seemingly exhausted itself, when, after a long 
silence, there appeared suddenly among the 
Jewish people a Prophet of superlative illumi- 
nation. 

Many gifted men had gone before Him, in 
that thorny road of prophetic instruction and 
heroic devotion ; but He was unique, something 
unpremeditated, a new type of genius, a Master 
Original. He was a surprise to the world. 
Even His enemies acknowledged that "never 
man spake like this man,' 5 and it is not to be 
wondered at, that His disciples, in their annals 
of His life, picture Him as the Light of the 
World, the Life of Men and the Word of God. 
(134) 



THE UNEXPECTED CHRIST. ^35 

lie has very naturally been compared with 
Socrates, Confucius, Zoroaster, Gautama and 
others ; but it is interesting to notice that these 
men of exalted character and wonderful wisdom 
seem great in proportion as they are like Him. 
He was peerless, in the judgment of all histo- 
rians and of all religious critics, the standard of 
measurement for the prophets of every nation 
and age. 

In dealing with this great historical character, 
we are approaching a problem of rarest com- 
plexity and profundity. 

And it seems wise to begin our study by con- 
centrating attention upon the unexpectedness 
of Christ's career, and the entire originality of 
His character, words and work. We must for- 
get our familiarity with Christian types of virtue 
and lines of thought, and put ourselves among 
the intelligent contemporaries of the Jewish 
Teacher, so that, if possible, we may receive 
the striking first impression of Jesus upon His 
age. So positioned, we shall perceive that He 
was not a mere outgrowth of His times, but un- 
expected, alone and, on the groundwork of 
ordinary conditions, impossible. 

We are aware that this assertion is boldly 
denied by many bright and earnest minds, who, 
being accustomed to the summary methods of 
physical science and of historical criticism, think 



136 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

to resolve Jesus of Nazareth, to account for 
Him and to explain Him into what is deemed 
His proper place in the story of human prog- 
ress. 

The theories that have been elaborated for 
the purpose of rationalizing the Prophet of 
Galilee have been many and contradictory, 
always changing and very evanescent. 

The lasting substance of them may be briefly 
stated. 

In all such attempts, it is in general claimed 
that the times were such and the circumstances 
such, that a Jesus Messiah was, in the year of 
Our Lord one, not only a possibility, but a prob- 
ability. Jesus, it is said, was a Hebrew prophet, 
like Elisha or Isaiah, of unequalled power, — but 
carried away by His own enthusiasm, tyrannized 
over by His own great thoughts, the victim of 
ideas the natural product of His times, whose 
life has suffered gross exaggeration and miscon- 
ception at the hand of biographers. Such, in 
brief, is modern Rationalism, as it essays the 
problem of Christ. 

But explanations of this sort ignore a num- 
ber t)f facts, to which we address ourselves. 

It is not true that Jesus Christ was, in any 
ordinary sense, an outgrowth of His times. No 
possible ingenuity can so account for His char- 
acter and history. Let those portions of the 



THE UNEXPECTED CHRIST. \<£ft 

Gospels which the more earnest of Rationalists 
have questioned be thrown aside, let Jesus be 
stripped of all adornment of miraculous power, 
nay, view Him as one might Socrates, Confu- 
cius and Mohammed, and still He can not be ex- 
plained on the groundwork of those particular 
and universal influences which ordinarily shape 
human experience and character. 

The more we scrutinize the facts, the more 
are we impressed with the contrast between the 
Messiah whom the Jews were expecting and the 
Christ that came. 

The Hebrews, from the beginning, had been 
a people of ardent religious yearnings. They 
had ever been wont to expect, with almost boy- 
ish enthusiasm, the actual realization in the na- 
tional life of great popular ideals. Their gov- 
ernment was purely theoretic: Jehovah was 
recognized as King; and the ruler in the palace, 
to whom pertained the baubles of power, was 
only His vicegerent. Temporal affairs and 
spiritual ardors were thus strangely blended in 
the national history. The people believed that 
their sins were the only obstacle to a faultless 
reign and a happy and holy national life. Out 
of their sense of guilt, out of their broken hopes, 
out of their intense religious ambition, there 
arose the idea of a coming Anointed One, who 
was to realize all temporal and spiritual aspira- 



138 THE OUTERMOST RIM, 

tions and to wield all temporal and spiritual 
power and authority, not only over Zion, but 
over all the earth, a Mightiest of prophets, a 
Priest of priests, a King of kings. These pop- 
ular aspirations rose and fell, narrowed and 
widened, became lustrous or dim, according to 
circumstances and the religious warmth of the 
times : they formed great tides of spirituality, 
now filling the popular thought up to highest 
water-mark of expectancy, and again leaving 
bare weed-covered shoals and sunken rocks of 
hopeless unbelief. In certain natures such an- 
ticipations had always been pure and elevating ; 
with the masses they were seldom other than 
dreams of conquest and glory, though even in 
the latter case the intense religiousness of the 
Jewish race was always deeply involved. The 
Messiah expected, and to all appearances need- 
ed, was a second David, a man of war, who 
could both fight and rule, — a priest and holy, — 
but pre-eminently a magnificent despot, whose 
kingdom should be visible and terrible, with 
brave Jews for legionaries and Scribes and 
Pharisees for councillors. 

When Jesus was born at Bethlehem, the tide 
of Messianic expectation was at its flood. The 
people were eagerly waiting. It seemed, in- 
deed, "the latter times," a very "Day of Jeho- 
vah," " a day of darkness and of gloominess, a 



THE UNEXPECTED CHRIST. ^39 

day of clouds and of thick darkness." Zion, 
the beautiful city, lay desolate in the ravishing 
grasp of Rome ; a citadel, occupied by legion- 
aries, overlooked the sacred precincts of the 
Temple ; massacres of Jews by Gentiles were 
constantly occurring in the towns of Galilee; 
and all the ills of conquest and misrule vexed 
the Land. The suffering people argued: that 
the vials of the wrath of God must have poured 
forth their utmost contents. A great body of 
Jewish citizens were calling on God, in agony 
of spirit, day and night. Surely Zion would soon 
aiise from the dust and put on her beautiful 
garments and shine ! It was a period of illusion. 
Men deeming themselves watchmen on the walls, 
now and again fancied that they heard the 
footfalls upon the mountains of the heralds that 
were coming with glad tidings to publish peace. 
In vision they saw Messiah in His glory rise up 
a power in the land, they beheld the gathering 
armies, the glorious warfare, the overthrow of 
Roman legions, the breaking up of Gentile 
nations, and the supremacy of Jerusalem from 
the River unto the ends of the earth. In the 
eagerness of their expectation and the assurance 
of their hope, they looked upon their oppressors 
with ravenous, exulting eyes, as though already 
fallen beneath their heel. 

Just then came John the Baptist from the 



140 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

wilderness, preaching repentance. At once 
flashed from fervent lips the yearning query: 
" Who art thou ? Art thou the Christ ? " And 
when John declared that he was the Forerun- 
ner, and that the "Kingdom" was "at hand," 
none were surprised. Were they not ready for 
these things? Had not "the fulness of the 
times" come? 

The Eationalists are thus quite right in 
claiming that the age demanded a Christ, and 
that nothing was more natural than that at such 
a time a Christ should appear. Men attempt- 
ing to play that role did come upon the scene. 
Two such are alluded to in the book of Acts, 
Theudas and Judas, both of whom seemed to 
have been ambitious to meet the national desire. 
Josephus mentioned others. These men were 
the natural and proper outgrowths of the soil. 
They tried to deliver Zion by the sword, and so 
to realize what was universally the orthodox 
idea of the Messianic glory. Up to the very 
overthrow of Jerusalem, the land was disturbed 
by these attempts. 

And had Jesus been such a one as Theudas 
or Judas, the Rationalists would be right, and 
Christ but the natural fruit of His times. 

But undeniably far other was the Son of 
Man. In every respect He was just what the 
people did not expect, just what even the 



THE UNEXPECTED CHRIST. \±\ 

scholars and the devout least could under- 
stand. Explain them as you will, He possessed 
the most varied and wonderful powers. Dis- 
missing the question whether He miraculously 
healed the sick and raised the dead, not even 
the most skeptical will deny Him the largest 
mental capacity 3 insight extraordinary, the most 
powerful imagination, and a perfect subjection 
of physical desires to the supremacy of will. 
His grasp upon other men was so magnetic and 
irresistible, that at a word they left business 
and friends and became His disciples, willing 
to die for love of Him and of His cause. Had 
He robed Himself in purple at the head of the 
Messianic party, His would not likely have been 
the fate of Theudas, who was slain with his 
four hundred, nor that of Judas of Galilee, who 
perished with much people ; Jesus of Nazareth, 
if go down He must before the eagles of Rome, 
would have fallen in the last and best blood of 
Israel, and His extinction would have been the 
extinction of the national life. Were the ra- 
tionalistic hypotheses true, Christ, when He 
became conscious of His extraordinary powers, 
would have at least made such an effort. It is 
recorded, that at this very crisis of self -discovery 
in His career He was so tempted to do ; and at 
least once the people afforded Him the best of 
excuses for ambition, by seeking forcibly to 



142 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

crown Him as their king, and to compel Him 
to take to arms. 

Jesus sternly hushed the voice of the Tempter, 
and persistently evaded and forbade the disloyal 
adulation of the crowd. Though boldly claim- 
ing to be Messiah, He dashed every national 
hope by declaring that the " Kingdom " fore- 
told for ages was a purely spiritual reign of 
righteousness. " The Kingdom of Grod is within 
you." "My Kingdom is not of this world." 
One can well imagine the popular disappoint- 
ment and disgust at such announcements, and 
well understand the motive of the people in at- 
tempting to force the powerful Prophet into 
some overt act of treason against the Roman 
Empire that might necessitate a resort to arms 
and a reversion to the prevalent Messianic ideas 
of the day. Were all the glowing words of 
prophecy, and the long and bitter yearning of 
the past, to come to naught? Were Messiah, 
then, nothing more than a King of hearts, aild 
His kingdom but repentance, faith and love? 
Were there to be no overthrow of Romans, no 
golden sceptre for Jews, no rod of iron for 
Gentiles? They would not believe it. Surely 
He was only preparing the way, soon He would 
throw off this unseemly mask, assume royalty 
and defy His enemies. But stay ! what says 
He now? "Love your enemies, bless them 






THE UNEXPECTED CHRIST. I43 

that curse you, do good to them that hate you, 
and pray for them which despitef ally use you 
and persecute you ! " Love the Romans ! bless 
the Samaritans ! Pray for Pilate and his hire- 
lings ! 

And see how He walks through the cornfields, 
plucking the ears of grain on the Sabbath day, 
and how, in the very synagogue, He heals the 
withered hand. Shades of Moses and of the 
prophets rise from your graves as He says, 
" the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath 
day!" 

The righteous stood aghast at what seemed 
His profanations of holy things. With one 
wave of the hand He set aside the Rabbinical 
lore which had clustered around the Jewish 
Scriptures and now was dear to every class of 
the people. " Not that which entereth into 
the mouth defileth a man.' 5 " Te have heard 
that it hath been said by them of old time — but 
I say unto you." Even the Temple seemed 
menaced ; " but I say unto you, that in this 
place is one greater than the Temple." 

The people believed that a sudden and awful 
death was a manifest judgment of God upon 
some peculiar wickedness ; but on one occasion, 
when some were present that told Him of the 
Galilaeans whose blood Pilate had mingled with 
their sacrifices, Jesus queried, " Suppose ye 



144 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

that these Galilseans were sinners above all the 
Galiteans because they suffered such things ? I 
tell you nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all 
likewise perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom 
the Tower in Siloam fell and slew them, think 
ye that they were sinners above all men that 
dwell in Jerusalem ? I tell you nay ! but except 
ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." Thus 
He attacked their superstitions. Not less mercy 
did He show the national prejudices. At the 
very beginning of His ministry He astonished 
His disciples by preaching a universal religion 
to some hated and despised Samaritans at the 
Well of Jacob. Soon after, in His own village 
of Nazareth, He shocked the self-complacency 
of the synagogue by declaring " many widows 
were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the 
heaven was shut up three years and six months, 
when great famine was throughout all the land ; 
but unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto 
Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that 
was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel 
in the days of Elisha, the prophet ; and none of 
them was cleansed save Naaman the Syrian." 

Somewhat later He praised the faith of a 
Roman Centurion, and turning to His Jewish 
followers, He added the stinging rebuke: 
" Verily I say unto you, I have not found so 
great faith, no, not in Israel "; and then came 



THE UNEXPECTED CHRIST. \Jj£ 

that grand utterance which no true Jew could 
seemingly have conceived, much less have ut- 
tered : " And I say unto you, that many shall 
come from the east and the west, and shall sit 
down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in 
the kingdom of heaven." 

Once as they approached a Samaritan village 
the sectional hostility, which for centuries had 
built up a wall between Judaea and Samaria, 
showed itself in a refusal to extend unto Him 
the rites of hospitality, because forsooth their 
faces were as though they would go to Jerusa- 
lem. James and John, those " Sons of Thun- 
der," full of the ancient prophetic ardor, and 
swayed by the ancient intolerant spirit, broke 
forth : a Lord, wilt thou that we command lire 
to come from heaven and consume them, even 
as Elias did ? " And Jesus showed how little 
He shared in the feelings of even the purest 
men of His day by rebuking them : " Ye know 
not what manner of spirit ye are of ! For the 
Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, 
but to save them." 

Once in an assemblage of Jews He wished to 
inculcate charity and spake a parable to this 
end. And the hero of the parable was a good 
Sama/ritan! There were probably not three 
persons in His audience, outside His own im- 
mediate followers, who believed that a Samari- 
10 



146 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

tan could be good at all. But Jesus saw fit to 
teach two kinds of charity at once by ascribing 
benevolence to a heretic. Moreover, in this 
audacious picture He still farther offended the 
national self-love by portraying, in contrast, a 
worthless priest and a worthless Levite. 

At a late day, and when His life was in peril, 
He grieved the patriotic party yet more deeply 
by boldly advising submission to the powers 
that were, in His proverb, " Eender unto Caesar 
the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the 
things that are God's." 

A striking illustration of the utter difference 
between the Christ expected and the Christ 
that came, is to be found in the denunciations 
of the Pharisees. One is so accustomed to look 
upon these men as living types of hypocrisy and 
malice, that it is easily forgotten that they com- 
prised in their ranks the larger part of the de- 
vout of their day. Bad as they were, as a class, 
they represented such religion and such morality 
as there was in the land. Many of them were 
earnest, pure-hearted and spotless in life and 
character. They were pre-eminently the Mes- 
sianic party, who alone continued to link the 
Past with the Future. They had been, in days 
gone by, the Puritans of their times, and their 
history, in the main, had been interesting and 
honorable. Formal and heartless as they had 



THE UNEXPECTED CHRIST. \tf 

become, bad as most of their leaders undoubt- 
edly were, had Jesus been an outgrowth of His 
day, the Answer to a Need, it is inconceivable 
that He ever could have been brought to attack 
them, rather would He have done His utmost 
to conciliate and win them. He showed that 
His religious insight was totally different from 
that of the Rabbis, by hurling at the corrupt 
ring of Pharisees who controlled things in 
Jerusalem, a most scathing and terrible indict- 
ment. 

And at the last, they were priests and scribes 
who arrested Him, priests and scribes who ac- 
cused Him before Pilate, priests and scribes 
who incited the rabble to cry, " Crucify Him ! " 

But even more significant than this was the 
awe and perpetual astonishment of those who 
knew most of His inward life. He was a mys- 
tery, and to pure and thoughtful men like Na- 
thaniel and John. He seemed, even to such 
spiritual natures, high up above them — His 
thoughts, His purposes and His personality — in 
the clouds. His own mother, Mary, the most 
patient, gentle, ardent and spiritual of women, 
understood Him not, and more than once fell 
under His rebuke for failing to comprehend. 
She pondered and waited, and with silent tongue, 
but wide-open eye and beating heart, followed 
His sayings and His works to the very hour and 



148 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

place of the Crucifixion. Once her anxiety 
mastered her reverence, and, with her relatives, 
at a time when Jesus was followed by great 
crowds, and at the height of His popularity, 
she endeavored to reach His person, no doubt to 
urge Him to rest and to prudence; but Jesus 
only replied to the summons in His strange, 
prophetic personality, with the words, "Who 
is my mother ? and who are my brethren ? " and 
He stretched forth His hands toward His dis- 
ciples, and said : " Behold my mother and my 
brethren ! " 

His chosen apostles were in constant per- 
plexity. They enjoyed intimacy with their 
Lord, but never familiarity. They whispered 
among themselves about His meanings: they 
misunderstood, took offence and murmured be- 
hind His back. In the storm on the Lake, they 
scarcely dared awaken Him ; and at night, when 
He met them on the water, they were sore 
afraid. He led a life by Himself, about which 
they surmised. Whole nights He spent alone 
upon mountains, presumably in prayer and 
meditation. Once He asked them, suddenly, 
" Whom say men that I, the Son of Man, am ? " 
and the question revealed a great gulf in confi- 
dence between Master and disciples. On that 
last night in which He was betrayed, after a 
long and tender farewell address, came this tardy 



THE UNEXPECTED CHRIST \±Q 

acknowledgment : " Lo ! now speakest thou 
plainly and speakest no proverb. Now are we 
sure that thou knowest all things and needest 
not that any man should ask thee : by this we 
believe that thou earnest forth from God." 
And Jesus sadly responded : " Do ye now be- 
lieve ? Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now 
come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to 
his own, and shall leave me alone ! And yet I 
am not alone, because the Father is with me ! " 
These words speak volumes of the loneliness of 
Christ's inner life all these years. The same 
appears in the mournful irony of His saying to 
the drowsy disciples in Gethsemane : " Sleep 
on now and take your rest ! Behold, the hour 
is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into 
the hands of sinners." 

One memorable night Jesus took His most 
spiritual apostles with Him up a mountain and 
gave them a glimpse (in the Transfiguration) of 
what He was when alone with God ; but they 
could not understand, and were only awestruck 
and helpless. 

It now must be apparent to every candid 
reader that the rationalistic hypothesis explana- 
tory of Christ is untenable. He was not a 
product of circumstances. He neither received 
His call from any recognized existing need nor 



|50 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

His inspiration from popular traditions and 
hopes. Nay, rather the facts show that Jesus 
as a character and His life as a mission were 
alike inconceivable to the human imagination of 
that day. None but a Christ could have in- 
vented a Christ. He was the wonder of His 
own day. And He has remained the wonder 
of history. Hundreds of lives of Jesus have 
been written, viewing Him from many stand- 
points ; but there still remains amazement in 
every earnest, contemplative mind, and still 
much to think and to say. 



CHAPTER XL 

CHRIST AS AN EPOCH-MAKER. 
1 ' Anno Domini f " 

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, " Great 
men are like meteors : they glitter, and are 
consumed, to enlighten the world." And often 
is it true that genius is a mere flash in the dark 
— dazzling, blinding, and soon out. Napoleon 
himself was a case in point. There is, however, 
a creative genius that shines like the sun for- 
ever, and by its beams illumines, vitalizes, glad- 
dens and beautifies. Such a Light was, and 
still is, Jesus Christ. His genius, like sunshine, 
was creative and perpetual. He died to rise 
again and live forevermore. His brief life 
turned the world upside down. He established 
a new Kingdom, He promulgated a new Law, 
and He introduced a new Civilization. But not 
as Lycurgus nor as Solon. His Kingdom was 
simply Righteousness ; His Law, the Golden 
Rule ; His Civilization, Justice for all and the 
Welfare of the greatest number. He treated 
men as though they were dead and demanded 

(151) 



152 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

such a moral reform that it should seem like a 
coming anew to life, a resurrection or a new- 
birth. Himself spotless, He set the standard 
of human character higher than any moralist 
ever before had ever conceived of demanding.- 
Pythagoras, Socrates, Gautama, Confucius, and 
others had forbidden enmity and evil-doing: 
Christ demanded that one should love his 
neighbor as himself. He denounced the world 
for its shams, its follies, its vices and its crimes, 
and yet showed Himself possessed of the largest 
faith in the possibilities of human reformation 
and attainment. Bad as man was, there was 
nothing he might not become. Though one 
were a very child of the Devil, he might become 
the Son of God, the Temple of the Holy Ghost 
and the Heir of Glory. His humble, ignorant 
and often dull peasant disciples were princes ; 
and any poor drudge, labor as he must, be weary 
as he might and afflicted beyond measure, in 
Him found rest. For with God there was no 
respect of persons. 

Seemingly all this concerned only the relig- 
ious growth of men ; but really it involved 
thorough revolution in human thinking and 
action, political, social and moral. It involved 
revolution, not at once precipitated, but in time 
inevitable. Indeed, it supplied the germs of all 
beneficent change. 



CHRIST AS AN EPOCH-MAKER. ^53 

Glance for a moment at this undermining and 
creative work of Christ's personality and teach- 
ings, in subsequent history. 

Christianity struck at the accursed evil of 
caste; which was recognized in the corrupt 
Judaism of the day. To be sure, nothing was 
said about slavery or classes in society ; but the 
system provided for their ultimate abolishment 
in its Golden Rule of Justice and Charity. 
Before God, the slave was as good as the Em- 
peror, the layman as the priest ; and in another 
world Dives might be in torment and Lazarus 
in Abraham's bosom. 

Christ said nothing against Tyranny, yet His 
Coming was the only terrible and lasting blow 
that ever has been struck at despotism, and His 
Sermon on the Mount is to-day the only unan- 
swerable argument for self-government. Seem- 
ing to consent to political evils which He could 
not at once abolish by mere denunciation, Jesus 
founded a purely democratic Church, a Repub- 
lic within the Empire, and the very babes were 
to be considered as in the Covenant — that is, 
in league with God. The principle of such an 
organization, open to all and inviting all to 
membership (or citizenship), was absolutely 
hostile to every kind of oppression, and was 
sure, in time, — as it came to be understood and 



1 54 THE ° UTERMOST RIM. 

realized, — to work free institutions. Our mod- 
ern Republics and constitutional governments 
are founded, not on ancient Greek democracy 
nor on Roman so-called republicanism, but upon 
the Church of Christ, with its unrestricted 
membership and its Golden Rule. 

A significant document from the secret ar- 
chives of the famous " Third Section" of the 
Russian Despotism has come to light in a Ger- 
man work recently published (" Yon Nicolaus 
I. to Alexander III."), in which Prince Galit- 
zin, Minister of Education, is accused of having 
introduced the " damnable practice of reading 
the Bible, which, as is well known, was the 
origin of the terrible reign of the Jacobins in 
France. Our servants are already beginning to 
imagine that they are the equals of their 
masters " ! ! 

Moreover, Christianity furnished new under- 
lying principles for common and statute law y 
germs to expand and grow and replace, until 
such time as human jurisprudence should be- 
come a very Sermon on the Mount. It pro- 
vided new sanctions for moral conduct in its 
Heaven and Hell, — vividly pictured for the 
rude culture of the age, — and thus gave, not 
only to the preacher of righteousness, but as 
well to the magistrate, a new guarantee for good 
behavior. 






CHRIST AS AN EPOCH-MAKER. 155 

Jewish custom licensed slaughter of prisoners 
and imprecation upon enemies. Christ not 
only enjoined mercy and forgiveness ; He urged 
principles that have rendered less frequent, and 
must in time wholly prevent, wars. Carried 
out in letter and in spirit, the Faith will break 
down national barriers, give resistless power to 
international law and introduce the peaceful 
reign of universal justice. 

Already, through the spread of Christian sen- 
timent, wars between civilized nations are be- 
come unprofitable. The conqueror is forbidden 
now, thanks to Christ, to enslave, rob or mal- 
treat the conquered. If he do so, the whole 
world cries out shame upon him. Hence 
wars are nearly as crushing a disaster for the 
one party as for the other; and the mighty 
force of self-interest is arrayed to show their 
folly, and by every device of diplomacy to pre- 
vent them. 

Jewish custom allowed polygamy / and under 
all existing systems divorce was a mere formal- 
ity. Jesus emphasized the sacredness of the 
marriage relation, He declared frivolous divorce 
a crime against God; and He hallowed the 
home as the very nursery of both piety and 
morals. 

But more radical and more important even 
than this general revolution, was that wrought 



156 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

on each individual believer who sought and 
found Christ. Views of life were expanded, 
the conscience quickened and the whole nature 
animated with earnestness. The Jews had 
looked upon life as all, or at least as the most, of 
existence ; the future to them, when not quite 
a blank, had been very dim and dreary. And 
Greeks and Romans had dreaded death, as, even 
in Elysian fields, less to be desired than life. But 
Jesus declared an Immortality of light, life and 
bliss. He said that He had come that men 
might have life and that they might have it 
more abundantly. This earthly existence was 
but a preparation, a sojourn in a desert : Heaven 
was Paradise and Home. Life was a Race : 
Heaven gave the Crown. Life was a prophecy, 
a study in faith, a school of discipline for vir- 
tue: Heaven was fulfilment, knowledge, per- 
fection. 

Christ brought to bear upon the believer a 
powerful commingling of motives, inclining 
him not merely to accept His teachings, but, 
much more, to practice them. Fear, ambition, 
conscience and aspiration were all appealed to. 
The head was convinced and the heart touched. 
And there was offered, of pure grace, blessed 
influences of the Divine Spirit, to strengthen 
the feeble will, steady the wavering purpose, 
convert the depraved heart, and to give assur- 



CHRIST AS AN EPOCH-MAKER. \fft 

ance of adoption into sonship and guarantee of 
the glorious liberty of the children of Grod. 
Christ's own personality became and has con- 
tinued a mighty power for good in the believer. 
History shows nothing else like it. Even to- 
day there are many millions to declare that it is 
Christ for them to live and that He is in them 
the hope of glory. 

This present, persistent, all-compelling per- 
sonality of Jesus appears in our standards of 
right and wrong and in all our judgments. The 
very brain-structure of men in general has 
undergone Christian modification ; and we now 
literally inherit something of Christ as an in- 
stinct. Christ is "unconsciously become the ideal 
of character and the teacher of the heart and 
the standard of criticism for all the civilized 
world. Even unbelievers in His claims endorse 
His personality, by constantly quoting Him 
against what they conceive to be unjust or un- 
true in particular statements of Christian faith. 
And when they find, here and there, in this and 
in that heathen sage, morsels of truth or senti- 
ment of a Christian flavor, they send up a shout 
of triumph ; which is a rare tribute to Jesus. 

It has perhaps already occurred to the reader 
that to Christ has been ascribed what Christian- 
ity has done only in the course of ages. But 



258 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

beyond question the glory is Christ's. At first 
the light shone in darkness, and it is true the 
darkness comprehended it not ; He came unto 
His own, and His own received Him not. 

Something similar has happened to all great 
illuminations of God-given genius. They have 
anticipated the final acceptance. The Coperni- 
can theory at first was pronounced false, and 
persecuted by not only the Church, but as well 
by the Universities. It was true and hence has 
triumphed, but long after its great discoverer 
died. Calculus is true, and long has been a use 
f ul method of mathematical research ; yet how 
many even of the educated could, off-hand, give 
any lucid account of it ? — the time, however, 
may come when it will be taught, like Algebra, 
in the high-schools. Mozart was none the less 
a musical genius because so few, even of musi- 
cians, can appreciate his "Requiem." Cathe- 
drals and paintings, inventions and discoveries 
are for the few, until they have, by and by, 
worked into the very brain structure and be- 
come part of the mental and emotional ma- 
chinery of the many. The few hurry on, the 
many lag after. The truth may at first be ob- 
scured : in the end it will prevail and become 
commonplace. 

Christianity illumined the Johns and Ste- 
phens and Pauls ; but from the beginning the 



CHRIST AS AN EPOCH-MAKER. ^59 

multitude of the disciples lagged far behind the 
opportunities and privileges of the new faith. 
Indeed the visible triumph of Christianity was 
not its real success ; and Christendom has never 
been quite equivalent to the power of Christ in 
history. Ecclesiastical history is the story of 
the conflict of the Christian principle with 
three Titanic foes, Judaism, Imperialism and 
Barbarism. 

Scarcely were the Churches founded ere they 
were filled with Judaizing believers, and the 
faith threatened to prove but a petty reform of 
the ancient Hebrew system of belief and man- 
ner of life. 

This danger escaped, there came speedily 
universal triumph and political power. Chris- 
tianity became the religion of an Empire, and a 
department of State. A Hierarchy, pervaded 
by the imperialism of the times, sprang up, 
and the gentle appeals of Jesus to the spiritual 
nature became the authoritative thunderings of 
councils, and His simple methods a gorgeous 
pageantry. 

The Churches, thus corrupted, were put to 
even severer test in the irruption upon the Ro- 
man Empire of barbarians. 

In the middle of the third century the Goths 
had invaded Greece, had sacked Athens and 
had burned the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. 



1(50 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

In the year 410 Alaric, King of the Visigoths, 
captured and sacked Rome. In 640 the Arabs, 
under the banner of Mohammed, took posses- 
sion of Alexandria, and burned the great library 
of the Ptolemies. So the deluge of barbarism 
rolled over the ancient seats of learning and 
culture, till all the world lay a waste of heaving 
ignorance and cruelty. Learning retreated to 
monasteries and desert caves. Civilization went 
into total eclipse. Art and polite literature 
ceased to be even a possibility. Physical Sci- 
ence, which under the Ptolemies and previously 
had begun to make encouraging progress, ceased 
its discoveries. Until the fourteenth century 
scarcely a work of art was executed in the 
whole of Europe worthy of preservation ; scarce 
a book was written worthy of perusal; and, 
except the mariner's compass, not an invention 
was made worthy of note at the present time. 
Everything beautiful, elegant or thoughtful in 
human intelligence long since had been suffoca- 
ted to death by the black fumes of stupid bar- 
barism. Everything except Christianity. Christ 
had not ceased to be a vital power in the world. 
Piety everywhere, in a humble way, flourished. 
Christianity, essentially missionary, was silently 
busy all those hard, dark and cruel ages, assimi- 
lating the enormous mass of political corruption 
and barbarism which had been thus rudely thrust 



CHRIST AS AN EPOCH-MAKER. 



161 



into her all -devouring ecclesiastical system. 
Without doubt Christian institutions failed to 
bear the strain and became themselves barba- 
rous, and the hierarchy of the Dark Ages unde- 
niably went with civilization into eclipse. But 
genuine religion survived, and with intense 
energy strove to leaven the whole crude lump. 
The force of Christianity for seven centuries 
was expended in the purely missionary effort to 
humanize the so-called Christian world. 

The Reformation was the first sign given by 
the Church of the Middle Ages of its assimila- 
tion of ancient heathenism and of its latent 
vitality. And even the Reformation, though 
an earnest effort to return unto the simplicity 
of the Master, lacked much of appreciating His 
wisdom, His charity and the scope of His mis- 
sion. Indeed we can assert with truthfulness, 
not that during these eighteen centuries the 
Church has been Christianizing the world, so 
much as that Christ has been Christianizing the 
Church. 

And if Inquisitions and Dragoonades and 
pompous idolatries in ecclesiastical history be 
referred to, the reply is at hand. The fountain 
of a river is not responsible for the filth of its 
tributaries, The Mississippi at St. Louis is lad- 
en with mud, but it would be fallacious to argue 
that therefore the upper waters were foul. The 



ii 



162 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

mud comes in on the Missouri. Have patience 
and those turbid waters will in time drop their 
sediment, and at last will issue forth pure upon 
the Gulf of Mexico. Christianity has been 
fouled by its tributaries, but it will in time 
issue pure as its original fountain. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. 

" The Christian Gospel is pictorial. Its every line or 
lineament is traced in some image or metaphor. All God's 
revelation is made to the imagination. And all the rites and 
services and ceremonies of the ancient time were only a prepara- 
tion of draperies and figures for what was to come — the basis 
of words sometime to be used as metaphors of the Christian 
grace. Christ is God's last metaphor" — Horace Bush- 

NELL. 

Great teachers, who would instruct their 
kind in new truth, encounter two serious diffi- 
culties as to method. 

First, there are no words fitted to convey 
their novelties of thought. The vocabulary of 
any language represents only what has been 
conceived and what is still current in the minds 
of men. Speech comes into being and grows 
to utter daily needs and to describe customary 
usages. A man of genius, then, who sees what 
none but he has yet discovered, and who would 
tell the world, must coin new words, or else use 
old ones with a new meaning. In either case, 
he will seem to say one thing and mean another. 
Perforce he must use language suggestively, he 

(163) 



161 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

mast talk in parables. The growth of words, in 
number and in meanings, gives us the entire 
history of human progress. The loftiest terms 
were once commonplace. " Tragedy " of old 
was but a goat song, " comedy " but a village 
ditty. The word " book " originally designated 
the bark of the beech-tree, on which our 
barbarous ancestors scribbled their thoughts. 
" Scribe " and " scrub " are cousins. " Spirit " 
once meant simply breath, and "lord" is the 
Saxon "hlaford" — loaf -giver. 

A teacher in new things can only avail him- 
self of this expansiveness in language; and, 
taking such words as best suit his purpose, he 
must breathe into them his own inspiration. 
But this necessity increases greatly the difficult}^ 
of making himself understood. In moulding a 
language he is educating a whole people and 
providing instinctive knowledge for future gen- 
erations; and the inertia to be overcome is 
enormous. 

This inertness is increased by a second diffi- 
culty, the general inability of men to understand 
novelties. Using language suggestively, the 
teacher appeals to the intelligence of his audi- 
ence; and too often it fails him. The most 
lucid expositions of unwonted truths and facts 
fall in general upon dull ears. Francis Galton, 
the author of a recent but already famous work 



THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. K35 

on hereditary genius, declares of the most culti- 
vated popular audiences that can be assembled 
in England, that " It often occurs to persons 
familiar with some scientific subject to hear 
men and women of mediocre gifts relate to one 
another what they have picked up about it from 
some lecture, — say at the Royal Institution, — 
where they have sat for an hour listening with 
delighted attention to an admirably lucid ac- 
count, illustrated by experiments of the most 
perfect and beautiful character, in all of which 
they expressed themselves intensely gratified 
and highly instructed. It is positively painful 
to hear what they say. Their recollections 
seem to be a mere chaos of mist and misappre- 
hension, to which some sort of shape and or- 
ganization has been given by the action of their 
own pure fancy, although alien to what the 
lecturer intended to convey." This does not 
prove that men are in general stupid, but sim- 
ply that original thinkers are ahead of their 
times, in both words and meanings, and that 
they put a severe and unwonted strain upon the 
average intelligence. The popular understanding 
as well as the popular intelligence must be edu- 
cated up to the teacher's level. But this in- 
volves difficulty and danger. Says the French 
writer, Fanin : " Fear of hypocrites and of fools 
is the great plague of thinking and writing." 



166 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

Prophets must be content to be misunderstood 
and misinterpreted, until the growing capacities 
of mankind take in their revelations ; and lucky 
for them if, ere that hour come, they fall not 
victims, like Socrates, like Cecco d'Ascoli, like 
Giordano Bruno, like a thousand others, — to 
the crudeness of their times. 

Is there not something impressive abont this 
hurrying of language after swift thought? — 
about this eager reaching up of the average in- 
telligence to comprehend the sublimities dis- 
covered by genius ? Dangerous to the teacher, 
fraught with difficulties of method for him and 
yet of such incomparable importance to the 
world. 

And those original men stand highest, who 
not only think the great thoughts of progress, 
but who as well stimulate the average mind to 
take them in. He who knows how to quicken 
the simplest language, so as through ordinary 
words to arouse extraordinary thoughts in the 
multitude, and who braves their prejudice, their 
ignorance and their passion, that one is to his 
inmost soul a prophet of the Most High. 

But if all this be so of popular instruction in 
difficult matters, generally considered, how 
doubly descriptive of the revelation of religious 
truth. Here, fanatical prejudice is to be over- 






THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. \§* 

eoine, and the language to be moulded anew is 
already crystallized into hard, exact meanings, 
sacred to foreordained uses. 

Moreover, here, a third difficulty appears. 
The matters to be treated of lie, in part at least, 
beyond the possibilities of any language how- 
ever elaborated, and beyond the full compre- 
hension of any mind however educated. Relig- 
ious truths are colossal, shadowy, appealing to 
Faith rather than to Reason, based on Intuition 
rather than on Logic and incapable of scientific 
demonstration. They challenge spirituality. 
When Deity, Providence, Salvation and Im- 
mortality are the themes, words reel under their 
crushing load. It is simply impossible to com- 
press the infinities of the supernatural world 
into definitions and formulas. Exact statements 
exclude the larger part. It is as though a man 
should attempt to frame in all space or to per- 
fect chronology for all time. The poetic, mys- 
tical utterance of the prophet, faulty as it ever 
must be, is far better than the prosaic theorems 
of the philosopher and theologian. The atti- 
tude of mind in which religious truth is con- 
templated is not analytic, but intuitive. And 
the faculty ultimately appealed to is that faith 
which underlies reason. 

Hence all religious teachers have been men 
of wit and imagination, who spoke not in defi- 



1(58 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

nitions, but in parables; who, in their vain 
struggle to find expression through their own 
words and understanding in their listeners, ever 
have meant far more and other than they liter- 
ally said. 

Take Plato's description of God : " Truth is 
His body and light His shadow ! " It would 
be a curious intelligence that could pronounce 
this gem of thought literally exact ; yet in its 
poetic suggestiveness it bears an infinitude of 
sublime reflection. An archangel might have 
said it, and still have had occasion to ponder. 

Much of former belief has come down to us 
in dark hints, mystic sayings and curious sym- 
bols. Indeed, it is hard to decide as to the 
highest attainments of the ancients; for the 
very reason that their beliefs were only for the 
initiated and uttered in imagery of word and 
act. 

Of all religious teachers, Jesus Christ, from 
the nature of the case, encountered the accumu- 
lated difficulties of divine instruction in largest 
measure. His ideas were not only new, but of 
infinite vastness of being and range, reaching 
not only beyond the conveniences of the lan- 
guages of His day, but beyond the very possi- 
bilities of any language, and not only hard to 
conceive of, but forever destined to involve 



THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. ±QQ 

perilous sublimities of thought. Both the pop- 
ular speech and the popular understanding failed 
Him ; and it directly appeared that, in part, 
speech and understanding must ever prove in- 
sufficient. 

There was but the one method available. 
He could only speak suggestively, using low 
words with high meanings and pictures instead 
of essays, forever throwing Himself upon the 
intelligent spirituality of the devout. This He 
did: daring ignorance and prejudice, He ap- 
pealed to spirituality. Casting off the old scho- 
lastic terms or using them in an astonishingly 
new way, He spoke in " parables " — for the 
Greek term parable means any kind of pictorial 
indirection ; and we are told, " Without a parable 
spake He not unto them." 

Thus He dealt largely in metaphors. He was 
the Yine, Bread from Heaven and Fountain of 
Life, Shepherd and Master. To become His 
disciple was Creation and Newbirth. Holiness 
was Life Eternal. His Gospel taught the Way. 

He frequently used comparisons. The King- 
dom of Heaven was like a Net, like Sowing, 
like seeking a lost coin or purchasing a goodly 
pearl. 

Sometimes His analogies of thought were ex- 
pressed by the same words for either term, but 
in different meanings, and there resulted all the 



170 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

freshness, though none of the vulgarity, of a 
pun ; as in His description of the mystery of 
conversion : " The wind (pneuma) bloweth where 
it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof 
and canst not tell whence it cometh and whither 
it goeth. So is every one that is born of the 
Spirit (Pneuma)," where the same term (whether 
spoken in Greek or Aramaic — pneuma or ruah) 
is used in a lower and a higher significance, 
with the effect of rendering vivid the compari- 
son. This solemn playing upon words was 
quite a favorite figure of speech with the ancient 
Hebrew prophets. 

Jesus delighted in contrasts. On one occasion 
He said : " Think not that I am come to de- 
stroy the Law ! " and He emphasized His dec- 
laration intensely. But at once He added of 
that class who most rigidly kept the Law: 
" Except your righteousness shall exceed the 
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye 
shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of 
Heaven." He vividly portrayed God's love, 
not by comparing it with a parent's fondness, 
but by a contrast : " If ye then being evil, 
know how to give good gifts unto your children, 
how much more will your Father, which is in 
Heaven, give good things to them that ask 
Him!" The parable of the Unjust Judge is 



THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. \^\ 

an intense contrast, its power lying in the utter 
unlikeness of the two terms, the thought being : 
" If an unjust judge, for the mere importunity 
of an insignificant suppliant teasing him with a 
bad. or at least commonplace, motive, should be 
brought to do his official duty, how much more 
a thousandfold will the just God listen to the 
reasonable cry of His dear children ? " 

Jesus did not despise hyperbole. " It is 
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a 
needle than for a rich man to enter into the 
Kingdom of God." 

Mark His effectiveness in irony. He would 
turn from the Pharisees with some such pun- 
gent remark as: "They that be whole need 

not a physician, but they that are sick 

I came not to call the righteous, but sinners 
to repentance." " I say unto you, that like- 
wise joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner 
that repenteth more than over ninety and 
nine just persons that need no repentance." It 
was irony when He said, in gentle rebuke to 
His drowsy disciples, on that last night in 
Gethsemane : " Sleep on now and take your 
rest : behold the Hour is at hand and the Son 
of Man is betrayed into the hand of sinners." 
There was an ironical lesson to His narrow- 
minded followers in His seemingly cruel re- 
marks to the Syrophenician woman who fol- 



172 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

lowed Him and besought Him to heal her 
daughter. The Master was at once testing her 
faith and uttering their bigotry in the words : 
" I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the 
House of Israel ! " " It is not meet to take the 
children's bread and cast it to dogs ! " And 
what else but saddest irony, borrowed from 
Isaiah, was that mournful utterance : " By hear- 
ing ye shall hear and shall not understand ; and 
seeing, ye shall see and shall not perceive. For 
this people's heart is waxed gross and their ears 
are dull of hearing and their eyes they have 
closed, lest at any time they should see with 
their eyes and hear with their ears and should 
understand with their heart and should be con- 
verted and I should heal them ! " 

Still more noteworthy were His parables 
proper — as of the Prodigal Son, of the Pharisee 
and the Publican, or of the Rich Man and 
Lazarus. 

And not only in set speech did He teach by 
images and pictures, His most ordinary conver- 
sation was in riddles. Did an over-zealous, 
light-hearted and empty-headed fellow come 
running to Him with a breathless and thought- 
less " I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou 
goest ! " he was calmed down to ponder over 
these words: "Foxes have holes and birds of 
the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath 



THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. JY3 

not where to lay His head ! " Did a really 
earnest man make excuses when commanded to 
follow Him, " Lord, suffer me first to go and 
bury my father!" he was curtly bidden, "Let 
the dead bury their dead ; but go thou and 
preach the Kingdom of God." 

Nor was Jesus content with indirection of 
speech, public and private. He taught also in 
vivid pantomime. He acted parables, as in 
breaking bread and feeding the five thousand, 
as in washing His disciples 5 feet and in driving 
the traders from the Temple. Indeed, His 
every miracle was a pictorial sermon on faith, 
an object-lesson in righteousness. How vividly 
true was this of His miraculous healings. Every 
reader of the Word must have noticed that in 
general, if not always, He insisted upon " faith " 
as a condition to the exercise of His beneficent 
power. This He did, not that He could not 
work the deed of mercy without some particular 
subjective state of mind in the patient, but 
seemingly because His ministry as a physician 
was purposely subordinated to the great end of 
Salvation. Every miraculous healing kept be- 
fore the people in connection three things : the 
Disease, the Physician and Saving Faith. The 
disease was not sin, the physician not necessarily 
a savior of souls, and the faith demanded was 
not what the Christian religion afterward re- 



174 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

quired ; but the former typified the latter. In 
this way Jesus familiarized the people with the 
idea of salvation by faith, and prepared the way 
for the great dogma of Justification. His very 
life accommodated itself to the urgent necessi- 
ties of the situation. The Temptation, the 
Transfiguration, the Crucifixion, the Resurrec- 
tion and the Ascension, were all, apart from this 
historical or doctrinal meaning, vastly effective 
as divine parables for the instruction of the 
world, and so used by His apostles, notably by 
Paul. 

The dogmas of Christianity were all pictorial, 
and never, at least by Jesus, scientifically ex- 
pressed. To become a Christian was — viewed on 
the human side — to " change purpose," to becom 3 
"as a little child," to "writhe (ayooviZo}xaC) 
into the strait gate"; while from the divine 
side it was to be "born again of water and of 
the Spirit," to be "new created in Christ Jesus." 
Virtue was described as Love. Heaven was 
Abraham's Bosom, or Paradise, or My Father's 
House ; and Hell was Gehenna — the moral ref- 
use heap of the world. The relation of Jesus 
to the Father was Sonship, and Hispre-existence 
was asserted in the enigmatic phrase, " Before 
Abraham was, I am." Atonement was simply 
described as somehow vicarious. Jesus was the 
Shepherd, who gave His life for the sheep. 



THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. ]_Y5 

His blood was shed for the remission of sins. 
Like the brazen serpent in the Wilderness He 
must be lifted up on the Cross — though no real 
serpent — for the healing of those who were bit- 
ten of the serpent of sin. He was Saviour of 
the World ; and whosoever believed in Him 
should not perish, but have everlasting life. 

In short, the great dogmas were from Beyond, 
and though revealed were still on the Outermost 
Eim of human thought. 

Doubtless by thus speaking in parables 
Christ subserved some of the ordinary ends of 
pictorial discourse. 

He winnowed thereby His audience. The 
difficulty in understanding drove away the 
gaping senseless crowd, who ever were ready to 
go out after a new Messiah, who shouting one 
day "Hosanna ! " were ready on the morrow to 
join in the cry of " Crucify him ! " To such 
His veiled Spirituality was displeasing. What 
these wanted were loaves and fishes, miracles, 
battles and spoils. Jesus, through His parables, 
was soon rid of them. A marked instance of 
this occurred after His discourse at Capernaum, 
where He told them that they must eat His flesh 
and drink His blood, to their very great disgust. 
Only the thoughtful could have patience to fol- 
low His subtle meanings with docility and spirit- 
ual insight. 



176 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

Moreover, for such as would listen, what He 
said and did was more easily and correctly re- 
membered for being pictorial. His words were 
darts, with point of steel and tipped with 
feathers of blue and gold. At what they were 
aimed, there they struck; and where they 
struck they pierced, and where they pierced 
they stayed. They had what Howells declares 
the essential properties of a good proverb, 
" Sense, shortness and salt." Or, to borrow a 
still more apt illustration from an old Latin 
description of a good epigram, they were like 
bees, small and sweet, but with a sting in the 
tail. This was of utmost importance, as there 
was no one present with pencil and note-book 
to jot down directly His sayings and doings, and 
no printing-presses to secure an exact pres- 
ervation of what memoirs were ultimately writ- 
ten. His pithy sayings once heard, even though 
misunderstood at the time, were easily remem- 
bered ; while His vivid parabolic pictures and 
attitudes were never to be forgotten. In every 
word and action there lived the very soul of 
wit, and wit is immortal. Hence even we of 
to-day know to a certainty that He uttered these 
things, without any learned work on Evidences ; 
for none other could have invented them. 

But granting these subordinate ends, we are 



THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. ]_^7 

only on the surface of the matter. Christ, be- 
sides these considerations of utility, was acting 
under that higher necessity of which we have 
spoken. Imagery, and because suggestive rather 
than descriptive, formed the proper language of 
His thought. 

Once His disciples asked Him : " Why speak- 
est Thou unto them in parables ? " And He 
replied to themselves in riddles: "Because it 
is given unto you to know the mysteries of the 
Kingdom, but to them it is not given. For 
whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he 
shall have more abundance ; but whosoever 
hath not, from him shall be taken away even 
that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in 
parables ; because they seeing see not, and hear- 
ing they hear not, neither do they understand.' ' 
It will be noticed that this very compliment to 
their superior capacity to understand direct 
teaching of profound things is couched in highly 
indirect and almost mystical language. It cer- 
tainly did not ascribe to the disciples any insight 
which lifted them above the necessity upon 
which we are dwelling. It simply meant that 
they needed less stimulation than the multi- 
tude, with whom anything like categorical 
statements of the " mysteries of the Kingdom " 
was entirely out of the question. Men could 
12 



178 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

be shown divine things only according as they 
already had spirituality of discernment and 
understanding ; just as, in business, men made 
money who had capital to trade upon. 

Indeed, it is very significant of the peculiar 
difficulties and perils which beset Christ as a 
religious teacher, that the very Apostles, select- 
ed doubtless for their peculiar docility and spir- 
ituality, were constantly failing in comprehen- 
sion, murmuring aside, whispering in a corner, 
and doubting, even up to the day of Pentecost. 

In this very suggestiveness lay the superla- 
tive value of all Christ's teachings. The most 
spiritual men never have been able nor are now 
able to exhaust His meanings. Take His simple 
and sublime " God is a Spirit, and they that 
worship Him must worship Him in spirit and 
in truth." That will be a theme for loftiest 
genius to muse upon ten thousand years hence. 
Or the dogma, " God is love." The word love 
here is crushed under its burden, and must 
grow large and strong with the ages in order to 
bear up. Jesus bade us pray, " Our Father." 
This was a parable. It could not have been 
technical description, for God is not our father 
literally. It could not have been figuratively 
exact, for we have learned that to Christ parent- 
al love was but a poor contrast to the infinite 
Mercy. There is a limit to even a father's 



THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. \>JQ 

solicitude, and many parents are unjust and 
cruel. The phrase, however, admirably served 
the purposes of suggestion. It set men think- 
ing. The analogy was only a crutch, which, 
as the limb strengthened, might be thrown 
away. So of all the picture-lessons, proverbs, 
sarcasms, riddles and dogmas uttered by Jesus. 
They were hints, symbols, aids to religious re- 
flection, appeals to spirituality. 

The Kingdom of Heaven was, indeed, like a 
sower going forth to sow, and planting seed and 
leaving it to the sunshine and the rain, well 
knowing that only in good soil would it bring 
forth abundantly. 

Hence the frequent warnings uttered by the 
Master, calling His listeners to heedful atten- 
tion. As the oft-repeated, " He that hath ears 
to hear, let him hear ! " Once He said to His 
disciples in encouragement, " Blessed are your 
eyes, for they see : and your ears, for they hear." 
On one occasion a certain woman loudly declared, 
happy the mother who had borne such a Son : 
Jesus replied, pointedly, " Yea, rather blessed 
are they that hear the Word and keep it." Such 
declarations as these were frequent on the lips 
of Jesus : " Te shall know the truth, and the 
truth shall make you free." u The words that 
I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are 
life." 



1 30 THE O UTERMOST RIM. 

We are thus called to contemplate a fact of 
utmost importance, not only as regards all re- 
ligions truth, but especially as concerns the 
teachings of Jesus and the dogmas of Christi- 
anity. And the reader will not unreasonably 
demand to know its bearing. 

Some would have it that our Bible becomes 
a sort of Chinese puzzle for ingenuity to pick 
out, a magic mirror or a crystal globe in which 
conjurors can discern the signs of the times and 
predict the future Millennium and the Second 
Advent — a land of dreams in which the imagi- 
nation may run riot at will. 

Nothing, however, could be further from the 
truth. Jesus was intensely, and even unto 
death, in earnest. It would be quite impossible 
to show that He ever uttered one syllable for 
mere curiosity to puzzle over, or pictured one 
symbol for mere ingenuity to decipher. The 
parables of righteousness lend themselves to no 
purpose of divination, and appeal only to spir- 
ituality. 

It certainly does result from this great fact 
upon which attention has been fixed : that 
creeds, however well they may temporarily serve 
certain purposes, must be ever very imperfect 
either for profound or for lasting expression of 
dogmatic truth. 

Moreover, this great fact that Jesus spoke in 



THE TRUTH IN PARABLE. \§\ 

parables forever deprives dogmatism of logical 
standing-room. Dogmatism and persecution 
thrive only on such hard and fast and narrow 
statements as can be used for standards of judg- 
ment and condemnation. A truth which needs 
spirituality to discern its meaning can never 
become a reasonable ground for anathemas, 
thumb-screws and the stake. 

But pre-eminently the lesson of the great 
fact is the thesis of this entire treatise. Divine 
things, though clearly revealed, need patience, 
reverence and spirituality. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST. 

" yesus Christ is not only, as many at the present day 
would have it, a great question : He is far rather the divine 
Answer to all human questions and complaints. If we look 
at Hi?n merely as a question, He becomes more and more un- 
intelligible.'" — Christlieb. 

If, in this chapter, we question the authority 
of Jesus as Teacher and Saviour of Men, it will 
be only that He Himself may answer. 

Christ declared His inspiration prophetic and 
His authority absolute as the truth itself. 

" I came forth from the Father." " Whom 
He hath sent, Him ye believe not." u My doc- 
trine is not mine, but His that sent me." " As 
my Father hath taught me I speak these things." 
" I have not spoken of myself, but the Father 
which sent me, He gave me a commandment, 

what I should say and what I should speak 

Whatsoever I speak, therefore, even as the 
Father said unto me, so I speak." " The Word 
which ye hear is not mine, but the Father's 
which sent me." Like the Hebrew prophets 
(182) 



THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST. 1§3 

of old, He was a Mouthpiece of Jehovah, a 
" Man of the Spirit." 

It is customary in Apologetic Theology to 
base the argument for the validity of Christian 
revelation upon Christ's miracles. Doubtless 
these served as divine vouchers durino; His life- 
time and did much to give to the new religion 
a vigorous start. It may be fairly questioned, 
however, whether the old method is equally 
available with the skeptics of to-day. The 
difficulty of proving that the miracles actually 
occurred in the face of modern Biblical criticism 
and of the hostile attitude of science has become 
very great. Nay, rather a strange reversion of 
method is impending, and the miracles instead 
of guaranteeing Christ are likely to be them- 
selves accepted only on the authority of Christ. 

This is not to be regretted. It brings us to 
the heart of the matter. Jesus of Nazareth, as 
a Divine Teacher and Saviour, must, in the last 
analysis, appeal to the minds and hearts of men 
on the strength of Himself. What He said and 
was for all mankind must form the challenge to 
spirituality. His Revelation, His Mission, 
Himself, all taken in their unity and simplicity 
as one Religious Phenomenon, must be accept- 
ed or rejected on inherent merit. 

Jesus laid great stress upon the mind-quick- 
ening and soul-convicting power of what He in 



184 THE OUTERMOST RIM % 

various ways revealed. The Truth carried its 
own conclusiveness. 

" The words that I speak unto you, they are 
spirit and they are life." He considered His 
system of truth so persuasive and irresistible, 
that men who rejected it thereby condemned 
themselves. u If any man hear and believe not, 
I judge him not, for I came not to judge the 
world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth 
me and receiveth not my words hath one that 
judgeth him : the Word that I have spoken, the 
same shall judge him in the last day. For I 
have not spoken of myself." Jesus herein, as 
elsewhere, appealed to His teachings as being 
not the speculations of a philosopher, but self- 
evidently the eternal truth. He spake from 
God to the religious nature. Hence there can 
be no authoritative go-between, no final pope, 
council nor creed. The inmost soul must de- 
cide upon His claims. 

This showed a truly marvellous faith in the 
capacity of the human soul to appreciate vital 
truth ; and yet did not go beyond the provable 
facts of the case. 

There is, surely, within us a trustworthy re- 
sponse to religious truth. Joubert has said: 
" When a nation gives birth to a man who is 
able to produce a great thought, another is born 



THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST. J 85 

who is able to understand and admire it." We 
might enlarge upon this to declare that when 
God raises up a prophet to utter things from 
Beyond, there are some ears that will hear and 
some hearts that will thrill. 

Somewhat of an analogy exists between this 
response of spirituality and aesthetic taste. As 
there is in every one a certain taste to detect 
the beautiful and more or less latent ; so is there 
in all an instinctive feeling for the higher kinds 
of truth, more or less uncultivated. The reason 
that all men do not feel the entire force of a 
great dogma of righteousness, on first presenta- 
tion, is that the inner sense referred to, like 
aesthetic taste, is in general rude and untrained. 

The tenderness and exalted sentiment of a 
great poem are not apparent to a child's mind, 
nor to any but those who have refined their 
natures into sympathy with the poet's enthusi- 
asm ; and the more one studies a masterpiece of 
poetic art, the more of touching and original 
thought is discovered. The study of art ex- 
pands the inner response to the beautiful. 

Go for the first time into a gallery of ancient 
paintings. You pass rapidly along, your eye 
glancing over the dingy surfaces of great squares 
of canvas. A comical beggar-boy by Murillo, 
a Flora by Titian or a group of Nymphs by 
Giordano arrests attention. The grosser beau- 



186 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

ties of art are perceived at once, but the great 
themes are passed by unnoticed. You look into 
your guide-book for the more famous pieces, 
and lo, a double-starred Raphael ! Strange you 
had passed it by ! How old it is ! how faded ! 
how homely ! Only a St. Caecilia, in peasant 
garb and with uplifted seraphic face, and earnest 
men to right and left. Few lines, few colors 
and no slightest trace of either manly or woman- 
ly charm of sense ! Yet somehow you like the 
picture, the face of the maid is so pure, sweet 
and spiritual, and her devotion so genuine ; and 
on the scarred and wrinkled visages of the men 
there appears a manhood so Christly. You sit 
down to study this work. It grows upon you. 
You go away and come again. You gaze and 
ponder and by and by you wonder. The pict- 
ure begins to fascinate you. You find yourself 
worshipping with St. Caecilia; you feel the 
thrill of her rapture; you resent the careless 
tread of tourists passing by ; you scarce dare 
breathe, lest her adoration be marred. Great 
thoughts now come into the mind, new feelings 
stir in the heart. You have communed with 
Raphael, you have begun to do homage to 
the true greatness of art. And at last you re- 
luctantly bid farewell to the gallery, wondering 
that you could ever have preferred Floras and 
Nymphs and have passed by undetected so 



THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST. Ig7 

superb a creation of genius. Henceforth you 
will study paintings with a new sense. 

Now something like this occurs in listening 
to the revelations of prophetic natures. If we 
will ponder we may understand. The sense 
grows with use. 

Doubtless this sense has its limits. Many 
spiritual truths from Beyond might be revealed, 
which it could not test. It is adapted to appre- 
hend and feel only such dogmas as have been 
or are likely to be revealed to mankind. 

And these not intricately. It is never abso- 
lutely unerring, and hence can have no excuse 
for being dogmatic. It is a general recognition 
and not a scientific analysis. Across the ages 
it detects in Christ the Divine : it hears, heark- 
ens, bends the knee, bows the head, believes, 
adores and obeys. 

Probably every earnest disciple of Jesus has 
been conscious of a growth like this, in years of 
study on the Bible and of reflection on Christian 
doctrine. No one can listen to Christ's words, 
in a teachable spirit, without being deeply 
moved and irresistibly urged on toward convic- 
tion. Probably no one has ever gone to Our 
Saviour, with the honest intention of giving 
Him a fair hearing, who has not been carried 
on from point to point, until the grandest 
stretches of divine thought have opened before 



288 THE ° U TERM O ST RIM. 

him. It is not strange that Jesus was so bold 
in His famous assertion: "If any man will do 
His will he shall know of the doctrine, whether 
it be of God or whether I speak of myself ! " 

This is the formidable argument in favor of 
Christianity. The words of Christ, with His 
character as illustration, guarantee His author- 
ity. His f uliilment of prediction is of intense 
interest, and His miraculous deeds of mercy 
very significant ; but the beauty, fitness, good- 
ness and inner conclusiveness of the truth ut- 
tered and lived mainly carry conviction. 

On that last night, in which He was betrayed, 
He said to His disciples : " These things I have 
spoken unto you in proverbs; but the time 
cometh when I shall no more speak to you in 
proverbs, but I shall show you plainly of the 
Father." He could only have meant to promise 
the coming of the Spirit of Truth to quicken 
spirituality and to work discernment. 

And he to-day who would " know of the doc 
trine " has no authoritative Church to interpret 
for him, and no sufficient creed to define, but 
only the great sayings themselves, a docile heart 
and the Spirit of Truth. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE MYSTERIES OF CHRIST. 

11 For now we see through a mirror, darkly." — PAUL. 

The mysterious in Christian doctrine was- 
recognized by Jesus, not only in His method of 
instruction through parables, as fully set forth 
in a preceding chapter, but by direct allusion. 
On one occasion He said to His disciples : " To 
you it is given to know the mysteries of the 
Kingdom of Heaven." This was the more sig- 
nificant, that the word " mysteries " had in the 
growth of ideas and of language come to repre- 
sent a great religious institution of ancient 
times. 

Among the Ancients, unwonted knowledge 
was a very dangerous possession; and exalted 
religions ideas, — such as there were, — preserved 
themselves from the laugh of the fool and from 
the curse of the bigot by donning the garb of 
Obscurity. Philosophers taught one thing to 
the multitude and quite another to their disci- 
ples ; and priests catered to the superstitions of 
the people in public, and in private cherished 

(189) 



190 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

thoughts they dared scarce lisp to one another. 
This resulted in systems of outside and inside 
(exoteric and esoteric) teaching, and careful 
processes of novitiate and initiation. Great 
truths were pictured before novices, — as it were 
in parables, — by curious symbols, solemn pro- 
cessions, impressive rites and dark sayings ; and 
they were misunderstood, except by the keenest 
trained minds, as it was intended they should 
be. These systems of philosophic and religious 
study and of scenic declaration were spoken of in 
general as " the Mysteries " — of Eleusis — of Isis 
— of Bacchus : they prevailed very early in Egypt, 
and later in Cyprus, Syria, Asia Minor and 
Greece, and probably all over the ancient civil- 
ized world. 

It is, then, of much interest and meaning 
that Jesus spoke of the doctrines of the King- 
dom of Heaven as "the Mysteries." Indeed, 
He seems to have appropriated a proverb which 
was current in the ancient world, and which 
grew out of the state of things just described. 
One form of it is found in Plato. " I conceive," 
quoth Socrates in "Phaedo," " that the founders 
of these mysteries had a real meaning and were 
not triflers, when they intimated in a figure 
long ago that he who passed uninitiated and 
unsanctified into the world below will live in a 
slough, but that he who arrives there after ini 



THE MYSTERIES OF CHRIST. \§\ 

tiation and purification will dwell with the gods ; 
''for many] as they say in the mysteries, ' are 
the wand-bearers, but few are the mystics f 
meaning, as I interpret the words, the true 
philosophers." This proverb, or some kindred 
form of it, Jesus adapted to His uses, changing 
the words, but keeping the form, in His own 
oft-repeated utterance : " Many are called, but 
few are chosen." 

Paul, equally impressed by this analogy, de- 
clared, " Great is the Mystery of Godliness." 
To him the Gospel was " the Mystery of Faith," 
"the Mystery of Christ," "the Mystery of 
God." It was " the Mystery which hath been 
hid for ages and from generations, but now is 
made manifest to His saints. To whom God 
would make known what is the riches of the 
glory of this Mystery, which is Christ in you 
the hope of glory." It was "the Mystery 
which from the beginning of the world hath 
been hid in God." The Apostles were " stew- 
ards of the Mysteries of God." Paul even 
described his illumination in preparation for his 
life's work in these words : "By revelation He 
made known unto me the Mystery ! " His 
very preaching bore the impress of this great 
fact as he wrote the Corinthians. " But we speak 
the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hid- 



192 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

den wisdom ; which God ordained before the 
world to our glory. Which none of the princes 
of this world knew, for had they known it they 
would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. 
But as it is written, ' Eye hath not seen nor ear 
heard, neither have entered into the heart of 
man, the things which God hath prepared for 
them which love Him.' " (Notice that this was 
spoken by Isaiah, and referred to the at that 
time future Messianic revelation). " But God 
hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit. For 
the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep 
things of God ! But the natural man receiveth 
not the things of the Spirit of God, for they 
are foolishness unto him, neither can he know 
them, because they are spiritually discerned ! " 
Paul was a mystic speaking unto mystics. As 
he plainly said, " We speak wisdom among 
them that are perfect!" His initiated, how- 
ever, were simply the spiritually-minded: his 
outsiders were the carnally-minded. And there 
was this grand difference between him and a 
Greek philosopher or an Egyptian priest, and 
between Christian doctrine and the Mysteries 
of Eleusis or Isis ; that initiation into the Mys- 
tery of Godliness was not exclusive, that knowl- 
edge in divine things was not proud, that the 
wisdom of the Cross was far other than that of 
the princes of this world, and that the wayfaring 



THE MYSTERIES OF CHRIST. ^93 

man, though a fool, need not, — thanks to the 
aid of the Divine Spirit, — err therein. 

A curious comment upon early Christianity, 
by a heathen, is preserved to us in the writings 
of Origen, which shows at once how deep-seated 
was this notion of esoteric knowledge in the 
ancient world, and which at the same time in- 
dicates how naturally men looked upon the 
teachings of Jesus as of this general character. 
The critic is Oelsus the Pagan, and he is attack- 
ing the Christian faith. He urges : " When 
the criers call men to other Mysteries they pro- 
claim as follows : { Let him approach whose 
hands are pure and whose words are wise.' Let 
us now hear who those are that are called to the 
Christian mysteries: 'Whosoever is a sinner, 
whosoever is unwise, whosoever is a fool, and 
whosoever, in short, is miserable, him will the 
Kingdom of God receive ! ' " Celsus was right 
in his charge, though foolish enough in his in- 
ference. It was the glory of the Christian 
mysteries that the invitation was general, the 
truths suited to the needs of all and the only 
qualification a yearning, humble and teachable 
spirit. 

Indeed, so keenly was this analogy perceived 
and so eagerly emphasized by the early Chris- 
tians that, in places, religious instruction literally 
assumed this form. For centuries in Rome 
*3 



194 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

there existed a system of communicating divine 
things through novitiate and initiation, called 
Disciplina Arcani, quite like the ancient meth- 
ods of Eleusinian and Orphic mystery. 

It is often complained that the Christian 
Faith is so full of difficult conceptions and great 
shadowy truths, that theologians can never agree 
on any exact statements ; and that creeds seem 
to be the mere garments of current thought, 
sure, in time, to wear out and to be cast oflf as 
rubbish. Historical Theology is accused of un- 
reality, inconsistency and changefulness. And 
the charge is perfectly true, and necessarily so. 
It is inevitable, that attempts to grapple the 
colossal thoughts of Christ and of the Unseen 
"World shall prove often relatively feeble and 
unsuccessful. It shows only that there are 
many wand-bearers and few mystics, many 
called and few chosen. Nothing can be more 
simple than to expect to iind theology — the 
science of divine things — as exact and compre- 
hensible as a landscape in a looking-glass. It 
is the demand of a child who, between his 
tops and his marbles, asks his father to tell him 
what electricity is, and how the telegraph wires 
carry thought. Religion is practical and sim- 
ple ; but theology is the most difficult of all 
sciences, — nay, as a mere science (without spirit- 



THE MYSTERIES OF CHRIST. 195 

ual insight) it is impossible. What, after all, 
is theology but the reverent gaze of a childish 
but learning faith upon things almost unspeak- 
able. The German poet Richter once said, " If 
there were no longer anything inexplicable, I 
should no longer wish to live, neither here nor 
hereafter." 

Take the central Christian Mystery, the God- 
man, the living, life-giving miracle of human 
history, Himself the Word made flesh, Imman- 
uel. What a sublime conception, and yet with 
what background of the mysterious. It is a 
snow-white pinnacle of divine thought, but 
rising out of dense clouds, its base all hidden. 
That God loves the world, despite the mocking 
testimony of pain and death ; that He breathed 
divinity into a man and made him the Word of 
God, to utter to men the divine thoughts, pur- 
poses and will, and to exhibit in sublime parable 
of character and mission the Infinite Mercy, 
and so to win men to virtue and to life eternal, 
and to become Example, Saviour and Intercessor 
for all who would heed ; what grander concep- 
tion has ever entered the human mind ? And 
from the stand-point of Spirituality, what can 
be more inherently probable ? If it be not true, 
then Nature is a more meaningless blank and 
life itself a more melancholy mystery than any 



196 THE OUTERMOST RIM, 

subordinate problem that puzzles the scientist 
or the philosopher ! 

But attempt to analyze this central Mystery, 
and how soon our thinking is found on the 
Outermost Rim of our mental capacity. How 
could it be? A God-man, scientifically con- 
sidered, is a monstrosity of conception ; possible, 
but outside the range of investigation, experi- 
ence and classification. In ecclesiastical history 
there is no more melancholy reading than the 
story of the long and bitter controversies among 
the Eastern Churches, during several centuries, 
over the person and nature of Christ. Science 
here is out of place. Accept or reject, but do 
not dissect. The doctrine is either a sublime 
fable or it is a supernatural fact, as high above 
the play of science as the stars above the mount- 
ains. 

Or, take the Christian doctrine of the 
Trinity. What light have theological contro- 
versies ever thrown upon it ? It is shrouded in 
all the mystery of Godhood. Jesus barely 
touches upon the facts ; but does not even so 
much as hint at their philosophy. God is our 
Father and His Father. God is, God is in 
Christ, God breathes heavenly influences upon 
us through His Spirit ; and the Father, the Son 
and the Spirit, these Three are One. What 



THE MYSTERIES OF CHRIST. \^ 

may be involved in this distinction, how radical 
it is, what bearing it has upon Time and upon 
human History, and just what lies back of the 
pictorial words, " Father," " Son " and " Holy 
Ghost," no one knows, nor at present has any 
means of determining. The word "person" 
which occurs in our creeds is used in an extraor- 
dinary sense. The term is strained to bear its 
new and crushing load, as we have no knowledge 
whatever of any creature with more than one 
personality. The word covers a mystery. Chris- 
tianity affirms as vigorously as did Judaism, that 
" the Lord our God is one Lord "; and no thought- 
ful Trinitarian at this day would consent to any 
statement of the doctrine that for one moment 
put in jeopardy the clear and emphatic enuncia- 
tion of the divine Unity. As regards the mys- 
tery, one must be content to conclude with Daniel 
Webster, that "we must not expect to under- 
stand the arithmetic of heaven." 

The doctrine of the Atonement, no less, has 
its background of impenetrable shadows. The 
efforts of church fathers and theologians to de- 
fine in exact words its involved sublimities, 
simply have served to emphasize the mystery. 
All philosophies of the Cross have signally 
failed. And this, notwithstanding the fact that 
practically the Cross has ever been the mightiest 



198 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

source of power in the personality of Jesus. 
Its moral influences over human feeling and 
action have been incalculable. Take, for in- 
stance, its sway over the imagination of a man 
like Paul. The proudest utterance of that great 
Apostle was this: "I bear in my body the 
marks of the Lord Jesus." He saw in the vol- 
untary submission and humiliation, suffering 
and sacrifice of the God-man, bound up therein, 
the Christly self-denial and heroism of all lands 
and of all ages. Himself bore crucifixion 
marks. He could preach only Christ and Him 
crucified ; but this meant, in his broad mind, 
the utterance of all truth, and the urging of 
everything that could stimulate the human 
mind to right thinking, the human heart to un- 
selfish feeling, or the human will to deeds of 
heroism. He could glory only in the Cross; 
but lo ! this meant a generous enthusiasm in all 
that ennobled his kind. To Paul the Cross of 
Christ was a phrase for Virtue suffering in 
humanity's name ; and Christ was the person- 
ification and His life the realization of this 
divine law. But why Virtue must suffer for 
humanity's sake; why one must endure pain 
that others may become happy, Paul never ex- 
plained, presumably because he could not. 

In the eighth chapter of this treatise, atten- 
tion was called to the great law of sacrifice in 



THE MYSTERIES OF CHRIST. ^99 

nature and in history. We saw that vicarious 
suffering was parabled in the facts of the phys- 
ical world, that the very brutes acted an uncon- 
scious heroism and that every page of the story 
of mankind had been illuminated with splendid 
deeds of self-denying prowess or endurance. 

All friendship, patriotism, generosity and 
humanity involved vicarious sacrifice; and 
indeed it was the universal law of humane life. 
The mother suffered for her child, the soldier 
for his country and the martyr for his faith. 
We saw that no religion coald escape the notion 
of vicarious sacrifice, and that every form of 
worship, it mattered not when or where, had in- 
cluded in its ceremonial some kind of offering 
or appeasement, at cost of the devotee. We 
found this fact mysterious and in a sense irrar- 
tional and from any natural stand-point inex- 
plicable. 

But Revelation justifies it. The Gospel tells 
us that sacrifice is inherent in Deity and is a 
law of the divine nature. To deny self, — to 
give, — is godlike. Well said the Lord Jesus, 
speaking ultimate verity, " It is better to give 
than to receive." The history of Jesus was a 
divine life given to the world, His death was a 
divine life offered up for the world. It was 
mysterious, as is all heroism : it was seemingly 
irrational, as is every form of sacrifice. When 



200 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

the Pharisees mocked the dying prophet on the 
Cross, the irony of Providence forced them in 
their intended sarcasm to utter sublimest truth, 
which at once condemned themselves and exalt- 
ed their victim: "He saved others: Himself 
He can not save." 

The Atonement of Christ was doubtless fore- 
shadowed by every deed of self-sacrifice that 
the world had ever known; and since Calvary 
it has been made reasonable by the daily unself- 
ishness of virtue. 

But the philosophical necessity of the Atone- 
ment is involved in mystery ; and its explana- 
tions have been but unsuccessful attempts of 
the learning, ingenuity and piety of this or that 
age. 

To declare that Jesus placated a wrath in 
Deity is to picture God as a being of malignity. 
To insist that He suffered the exact infinite 
punishment deserved by the elect is to claim a 
moral impossibility. To say that He showed 
God's abhorrence for sin, fails to appear in 
view of the fact that the innocent suffered and 
the guilty were forgiven. That He vindicated 
the majesty of law, and so sustained moral 
government, is undeniable ; but how ? 

It is probable, that of all philosophies of the 
Atonement, among intelligent orthodox be- 
lievers, what is called the moral theory is at 



THE MYSTERIES OF CHRIST. 201 

present most popular. But equally with the 
others it fails. Christ, it is urged, suffered for 
moral effect. But does the mother deny herself 
for the moral effect upon her child ? Does the 
soldier, on the battle-field, posture in death for 
the eyes of his countrymen ? Is the martyr in 
the flames a self-conscious tragedian? The 
mother, the patriot, the martyr, — though the 
moral effect may be and is great and beneficial, 
— are suffering to save the child, the country, 
the faith. The moral effect of the death of 
Christ was, as we have seen, immense, and His 
Cross has become the most vivid and useful of 
His parables ; but He died, if we are to believe 
His words, to save the world from Sin and 
Hell. He is at the summit of the law of sacri- 
fice, and the eternal necessities we may not now 
know. 

The dogma of the " New-birth " involves im- 
penetrable mysteries, as Jesus himself plainly 
declared : " The wind bloweth where it listeth, 
and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst 
not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. 
So is every one that is born of the Spirit." 

It is hard for us to realize the great force 
of this simile ; but it was patent to ISTicodemus 
and the ancients. In these times the winds 
have indeed lost their mystery: they have 



202 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

yielded up their secret to an inquisitive science. 
Man's telegraph outstrips their speed and fore- 
tells their coming. Meteorological bureaus, in 
many important centers, watch, record and pre- 
dict. They can no longer hide their " whence " 
nor deceive us as to their " whither." But to 
the men of Christ's day, air, like fire^ water and 
earth, was an " element," — impalpable, — life- 
giving or destructive, — and forever mysterious ; 
and the winds were a perpetual enigma. 

Ages have passed away, and though we have 
made the winds to give an account of them- 
selves, Conversion and the Life unto God re- 
main a daily marvel and no mean part of the 
" mystery of godliness." That the Divine 
Being should exert influence upon a soul di- 
rectly, yet the while unseen and perhaps unfelt, 
is astounding, awful, inscrutable. Undeniable 
as a fact, it is inexplicable in philosophy. 
Books many have been written on the subject, 
learned analyses have become innumerable and 
confessions of faith strive after unembarrassed 
statement and scientific apportionment of the 
human and the divine; but the enigma is 
unsolved. u The Breath of Jehovah " is in all 
its workings as much a mystery to-day as the 
winds to Nicodemus. 

And Resurrection, Immortality, Judgment, 



THE MYSTERIES OF CHRIST. 203 

Punishment and Glory are all stupendous 
truths, but in perfect keeping with the other 
mysteries of existence. They drop rather than 
lift a veil of Isis, on which are inscriptions, 
comforting, but hard to fathom ; and he who 
can discuss them glibly and without reverence 
is worthy only to be excluded from the Temple 
of the Unseen and Eternal. 

The future abodes of good and of bad are 
designated in Scripture only by picture- words, 
as Abraham's Bosom, Paradise, My Father's 
House, New Jerusalem, or Sheol, Hades, Ge- 
henna, and as Glory, Wrath and Torment; 
while only picture-words, such as palms and 
harps, golden bowls and white robes, praises 
and curses, hint at the future estate and occu- 
pation. Revelation on Last Things is the 
merest glimpse of light, and gives us absolutely 
no basis for any scientific conclusions as to the 
place, condition, employments or methods of 
the future existence. One is only permitted, 
by faith, to sing — 

11 1 shall lose this life, it will disappear, 

With its wonderful mystery : 
Some day it will move no longer here, 

But will vanish silently. 
But I know I shall find it again once more, 

In a beauty no song hath told, 
It will meet with me at the Golden Door, 

And round me forever fold ! " 



204 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

The difficulty of the dogmas of Christianity 
is not that they involve contradiction or ab- 
surdity ; but that, while practically of unspeak- 
able meaning to the heart, theoretically they 
defy analysis. To use an image of Paul's, 
they are reflected on the dull tarnished bronze 
mirrors of our human stupidity, and they seem, 
in consequence, shadowy and unreal. 



CONCLUSION. 



And now our work is done ; and we leave to 
the candid judgment of the reader our medita- 
tions upon the ever-expanding limits of knowl- 
edge. 

If our treatise has been followed carefully, it 
must have abundantly appeared ; that there is an 
Outermost Rim for all human thinking, and 
that there is a Beyond; and that, as the Horizon 
widens, increasing knowledge lends new majesty 
to the Unseen and Eternal World. 

We have perceived that dogmatism, even in 
the realm of physical nature and of necessary 
law, is entirely out of place, and that rather the 
attitude of every earnest scientist can only be 
one of reverence, expectancy and teachableness. 
We have seen how education and progress push 
back, on every side, the barriers of ignorance ; 
and we have discerned some reason even for 
believing that the mind of man itself ever ex- 
pands with the using. While over all the beau- 
tiful mysterious World, and over all the events 
of History, has appeared the inevitable dark 
shadow of human woe. 

(205) 



206 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

This preliminary study, revealing great needs 
and stirring great yearnings, incited us to 
hearken attentively for Voices from Beyond. 

We sought for meanings in Physical Nature, 
and discovered, at first glance, in all things and 
events, a Thoughtfulness other than our own. 
We found, moreover, an unbroken Succession 
of causes and effects. We perceived an in- 
veterate and irrefragable Persistency of Law. 
While in the majestic Movement of things we 
clearly discerned a Progress of Thought. It 
was therefore necessary to conclude : that the 
Physical Universe is one and simple, and that 
the Thinker of Nature is One and Simple, an 
Ultimate Intelligence. 

Thereupon we turned to the Moral nature of 
mankind, and it at once appeared that men, by 
constitution, have a sense of right and wrong, 
and form clear moral judgments, and that when 
they come to act upon these judgments they 
find themselves, within limits, free to choose. 
It further appeared, that the notions of guilt or 
innocence attach, necessarily, not only to men's 
doings and feelings, but to themselves as well ; 
and that moral conduct, good or bad, leaves in- 
delible impress upon character and exercises in- 
calculable influence over destiny. Finally, we 
saw that the moral consciousness works without 
any necessary relation to civil courts of justice 



CONCLUSION. 207 

or to personal thought of reward or punishment. 
And our conclusion here unavoidably was ; that 
Conscience is as ultimate and absolute as Science 
or Art, and that, as such, it can be viewed only 
as the hint of a Moral Government and a Moral 
Governor, a Judge of all the earth, supreme 
over all justices and all courts. 

Proceeding now to the investigation of the 
religious nature of mankind, we disclosed the 
secret of the logical compulsion which had 
forced us to the conclusions of the two preced- 
ing chapters. For we found enthroned in 
reason an intuitive knowledge of an Absolute 
Being. 

We discovered, also, worship everywhere and 
universal prayer. A belief in immortality was 
seen to be a mighty yearning of lofty natures 
and a natural and logical inference in religious 
meditation. There resulted a firm conviction 
that religion is a mental necessity, and worship 
of some kind an inevitable phenomenon. 

Glancing now out upon the varied drama of 
human history, a new class of facts presented 
themselves. Certain verv interesting laws — 
of Retributive Justice, of Sacrifice and of Sor- 
row — appeared inexplicable on any naturalistic 
or atheistic hypothesis. Rendering history 
tragic, heroic and pathetic, these great principles 
seemed designed to subserve the purposes of 



208 THE ° UTERMOST RIM. 

some lofty religion of integrity, of devotion 
and of patient faith. 

These many Voices from Beyond encouraged 
us to attack the central mystery of human 
thought and existence — the Mystery of God- 
liness. 

A brief glance at Hebrew prophecy convinced 
us that human insight into divine things has, at 
times, arisen to the level of supernatural and 
authoritative illumination. 

Thereupon we concentrated attention upon 
Jesus of Nazareth as the superlative religious 
genius of history ; and we mused upon the un- 
expectedness and entire originality of His char- 
acter, work and words, confounding to all 
naturalistic explanations and reductions. 

We pondered the vastness of the transforma- 
tion wrought upon human destiny by the re- 
ligious development He began and shaped, in- 
volving immense social improvement, political 
revolution, enlargement of ethical outlook and 
elevation of moral and religious standards. 

We studied Christ's method of appeal to 
spirituality by parables of word, deed and event ; 
and we saw that, in some respects, Christian 
instruction likened itself to the ancient mys- 
teries. 

We challenged the authority of Jesus with 
the result of an enforced acquiescence in His 



CONCLUSION. 209 

own great claims, acknowledging Him clearly 
as a Voice Divine from Beyond. 

Finally, we reviewed, in brief, the doctrines 
of grace as particular mysteries of the Mystery 
of Godliness, finding that Christian dogmas are 
parables and hints, suggestive and not exhaust- 
ive of truth. 

Thus everywhere we have come upon an 
Outermost Rim ; and everywhere have we seen 
reason to infer a Beyond, unknown but know- 
able. 

And, now, we ask the gentle reader, — not to 
acquiesce in every opinion expressed, nor to re- 
frain from challenging any seemingly doubtful 
statement of fact or truth ; but simply, in all 
meditation upon ultimate things, to yield to the 
sway of the lesson of our grand theme, in the 
spirit of reverence and in the power of a rational 
but simple-hearted faith. 

Of all periods of Christian history, this won- 
derful age in which we live most needs the 
urging of this theme and of its lesson. 

The times are not worse than they have been, 
— they are far better; but every age has its 
own weaknesses, and our weakness is overween- 
ing confidence and failing faith. Christianity 
is working away from the evils of former centu- 
14 



210 THE OUTERMOST RIM. 

ries, from hierarchy, priestcraft, superstition, 
intolerance and the like follies ; but new condi- 
tions have brought new dangers. 

Unbelief is widespread and is becoming in- 
creasingly prevalent. Infidelity to-day is urged, 
not as formerly, by outlawed and ill-balanced 
minds, but by men of learning, character and 
high standing, who have the ear of the public. 
Their bold or covert attacks upon religious in- 
stitutions have not been without deplorable 
effect. 

The evil is the greater that the churches still 
hold some untenable positions theologically, 
which they fear to defend and dare not aban- 
don. The yielding, one by one, of these fatal 
outposts, inspires fear and dismay in the citadel 
itself. 

Moreover, and still worse, inside the churches 
lurks a scarcely defined and often unconscious 
but very vigorous skepticism. This is repressed 
and concealed; but it is on that account the 
more dangerous. The indications of this are 
not merely frequent lapses of faith, but, much 
more, decline of zeal, irregularity in attendance 
upon public worship, abandonment of private 
devotion, a discontent with life and all its be- 
longings, an unchristian dread of death, a cyn- 
icism that readily believes evil of any person or 
movement and finally a failure to realize com- 



CONCLUSION. 211 

fort from God's promises. It was said of the 
people of the Island of Rhodes that they built 
houses as though they were immortal, but feast- 
ed as if they expected to die on the morrow. 
There are a great many saints who profess to 
believe in Immortality, and in their libraries, 
churches and alms-giving indicate a lively hope 
of everlasting life; who yet, in their inner 
thoughts and feelings, are less spiritual and 
more hopeless than barbarians. Their creed is 
faultless and they have a name to live ; but their 
religion is become a mere formula, a routine, 
perhaps a heartless and thoughtless parade, 
wherein is neither salvation for a lost world nor 
even personal safety from utter downfall of 
faith and character. 

The causes of this state of things we need 
not analyze. It is pertinent to our object, here, 
simply to express a conviction that the tap-root 
of the matter is in the discovery by men in 
general of the fact involved in the theme of 
this treatise. Men are perceiving that the old 
barriers of knowledge and belief are moving 
outward ; and they fail to discern, — what this 
treatise humbly attempts to show, — the real 
grandeur and beneficence of this steady expan- 
sion of devout thought. They have found that 
the Outermost Rim is not a hard and fast line 
of horizon, and they tremble lest in the new 



21 2 THE ° UTERMOST RIM. 

prospect Beyond they shall see terrible things, 
— not realizing that this, the seeming peril of 
faith, is its necessary condition of largest 
exercise. 

The evil is therefore not without its hopeful 
elements; and no greater mistake could be 
made than to suppose that genuine religion or 
sound theology are in permanent danger. Sim- 
ply, an unusual strain is put upon earnestness, 
reverence and faith. Only such as have built 
upon the sand need fear submersion from this 
tidal wave of infidelity rolling in from the 
east : it will try men's souls, it will test founda- 
tions — not only of the Christian religion, but of 
all faith in the unseen, and many doubtless will 
be submerged and swept away ; but ere long it 
will subside. Nothing good and true can dis- 
appear. No single trustful and earnest nature 
need be dislodged. 

It is the part of the wise man not to grow 
discouraged, but rather to study attentively the 
problem of present unbelief ; that, its causes 
and conditions discerned, the remedy may be 
applied and the pestilence stayed. The future 
is full of promise. 

Wisely said Lord Bacon : " The old age of 
time is the youth of the world." Yea, as the 
ages roll away, the world shall grow young. 
Enthusiasm, courage and faith, the virtues of 



CONCLUSION. 213 

youth, shall characterize the future far more 
than they have marked the past. Knowledge 
has endless vistas opening before it. Religion 
goes forth, conquering and to conquer. Let 
men fearlessly ascend and observe. The sum- 
mit of knowledge pierces the heaven of heavens. 
The horizon they behold is but the Outermost 
Rim ; and an Infinity of Truth and all blessed- 
ness of ever-expanding and glorified Life is 
Beyond. 




PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



